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Approximately 20,000 Britons registered as conscientious objectors during the First

World War. While there has been significant analysis regarding both their actions and

motivations, no previous study has comprehensively examined the testimony these men supplied

to the historical archive in their later years, during the 1960s-1980s, which represented their

unique cultural memory of the conflict. This thesis considers said testimony, alongside CO

sources contemporary to the war as well as historical research on COs, with the aim of

demonstrating that their experiences in the 1910s defined how these men thought about certain

matters for the remainder of their lives. These matters include their sense of identity and unity,

their politics and ideologies, their dynamics with other British citizens, their understanding of

masculinity in the context of the war, and their opinion of the nature of war in the aftermath of

both World Wars. The story encoded within these testimonies reinforce our recognition of the

vital role these men played in the development of Britain9s anti-war movement in the 20th

century and provide a potential blueprint for future generations of war resisters who may find

themselves needing to resist the order of their government to take up arms

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Conscientious Objection and Cultural Memory: Retrospective Perspectives AmongBritain’s World War One Conscientious Objectorsby © Colin ForwardA Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of therequirements for the degree ofMaster of Arts in HistoryMemorial University of NewfoundlandSeptember 2024St John9s Newfoundland and LabradorAbstractApproximately 20,000 Britons registered as conscientious objectors during the FirstWorld War. While there has been significant analysis regarding both their actions andmotivations, no previous study has comprehensively examined the testimony these men suppliedto the historical archive in their later years, during the 1960s-1980s, which represented theirunique cultural memory of the conflict. This thesis considers said testimony, alongside COsources contemporary to the war as well as historical research on COs, with the aim ofdemonstrating that their experiences in the 1910s defined how these men thought about certainmatters for the remainder of their lives. These matters include their sense of identity and unity,their politics and ideologies, their dynamics with other British citizens, their understanding ofmasculinity in the context of the war, and their opinion of the nature of war in the aftermath ofboth World Wars. The story encoded within these testimonies reinforce our recognition of thevital role these men played in the development of Britain9s anti-war movement in the 20thcentury and provide a potential blueprint for future generations of war resisters who may findthemselves needing to resist the order of their government to take up arms.ii2General SummaryRoughly 20,000 British men, known as <conscientious objectors,= refused to fightin the First World War. Many years after the war, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, these menspoke to museums and researchers about what that was like. Comparing their descriptions at thattime against what they wrote during the war shows us that these men did not change very muchin their opinions and beliefs as they grew older. Their stories show that by taking a stand againstthe First World War they made it easier for other British men to refuse to fight in later wars. It isimportant for their actions to be remembered because they can serve as an inspiration for othersto stand up against wars in the future, and because understanding the mindset and approach ofWorld War One conscientious objectors will help them be more effective when they take thatstand.iiiAcknowledgementsFirst and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Justin Fantauzzo,my supervisor, for his invaluable guidance. He has not only been an effective and encouragingmentor and a genuine wellspring of knowledge in the process of writing this thesis, but it was hisinitial encouragement that led me to pursue a Masters in History to begin with. Simply put, Icould not have written this without him. Additional thanks are owed to the other members of theHistory faculty who taught me during my pursuit of this degree, as their influence and wisdomplayed no small part in developing my aptitude as a scholar.I would also like to thank the School of Graduate Studies at Memorial University ofNewfoundland for the Fellowship, and all additional funding, that allowed me to pursue thisresearch.The staff at the Library of the Society of Friends in London deserve thanks also, both forthe assistance they rendered during my research process and for the genuine interest theydisplayed in my subject, which was highly appreciated and highly motivational.On a personal note, I would like to thank my family for their whole-hearted support andpatience with me throughout this long writing process. My father and sister deserve particularthanks for their countless voyages to retrieve me from the university library at all hours of theday and night. Finally, I would like to thank my fiancé, Emily, for her devoted assistance on myresearch trip to England. I would never have been able to gather all my research materials in timewithout her assistance in the archives, helping to photograph papers and transcribe oralinterviews.ivTable of ContentsAbstract iiGeneral Summary iiiAcknowledgements ivTable of Contents vAn Introduction: The Meaning and Value of Cultural Memory 1Chapter 1: The Development of Contemporary British Perspectives on World War One 7Chapter 2: Three Branches of Historical Thinking on Conscientious Objectors 19Chapter 3: Memory, Oral History, and a Discussion of Sources 31Chapter 4: Absolutism, Alternativism, Christianity & Classifications: The Stability ofCO Identity 39Chapter 5: <Not A Nasty Lot At All:= CO Retrospectives on their Treatment by their FellowMen During the War 58Chapter 6: White Feathers and Black Sheep: COs, Gender Dynamics and FamilialAlienation 76Chapter 7: CO Experiences of and Perspectives on 1918-1945 90Conclusions: CO Assessments of British Society Post-1945 & Beyond 109Bibliography 119vAn Introduction: The Meaning and Value of Cultural MemoryMore than a century after the bloody conflict finally came to an abrupt halt on November11th 1918, the First World War remains well-trodden ground for historians. Despite theundeniably massive scope of the conflict, and perhaps precisely because of it, one might betempted to conclude that there are surely few, if any, novel lines of inquiry left for First WorldWar historians to explore, especially those scholars primarily concerned with Great Britain. Afterall, over the course of many decades, countless valuable research projects have thoroughlyconsidered nearly every aspect of the war within Britain, underpinned by a wide spectrum ofmethodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds. Volumes upon volumes have beencarefully compiled covering topics such as the complex military logistics of waging war; theintense conflicts that raged at home within Britain9s political sector; the bloody, muddy yetperplexingly mundane reality of life in the trenches; the colossal economic and technologicalimpact of the great industrial systems of the nation, churning like never before; and the fashionin which the civilian population of Great Britain both physically experienced andpsychologically conceptualized the Great War.The legacy of the conflict is well-researched, albeit not as well-researched as the waritself. England9s cultural memory of the war has been the subject of numerous studies, perhapsmost famously Paul Fussell9s The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, whichdictated the proverbial terms of engagement for academic study of this topic for many years.Thus, if the First World War was once a fertile plot of ground for historians to dig into, it maynow appear to be as deeply mined as the pockmarked fields of Europe became under therelentless fire of artillery during the conflict itself. Nevertheless, there are still a few unexcavated1plots remaining for those scholars persistent enough to continue overturning the soil. One ofthese plots lies at the junction between two areas that have already been thoroughly uncovered.This is the overlap between the aforementioned study of Britain9s cultural memory of the warand the study of Britain9s First World War conscientious objectors, which is a topic that hasbenefitted from heightened academic interest over the past two decades. Yet, as I willdemonstrate, while both of those subjects have received their fair share of attention fromhistorians, their overlap 3 the cultural memory of Britain9s WW1 conscientious objectors in theaftermath of the war 3 has not been so fortunate. Remedying this oversight is the primaryobjective of this dissertation.Exploration of this topic requires, of course, a few preliminary definitions and points ofclarification. Who exactly were Britain9s conscientious objectors, and what exactly am Igesturing towards when I refer to their 8cultural memory9?The answer to the former question is, on the surface, a simple matter of facts. In late1915, the British government introduced the Derby Scheme, a program intended to encourageeligible British men to volunteer for military service by having them preemptively <attest= forservice without officially being called up for immediate service, essentially promising the Britishgovernment that they would answer the call to action whenever it eventually came. However, theDerby Scheme did not produce the results the British government had hoped for. According tohistorian Ilana R. Bet-El, although there were a little over 5 million men deemed eligible underthe age guidelines, only about 722,000 men attested, were medically fit for service and were notemployed in industries necessary for the war effort.1 This number was, in the eyes of the Britisharmy, an insufficient quantity of manpower. Thus, in January 1916, with no prospect of victory in1 Ilana Bet-El, Conscripts : Lost Legions of the Great War, (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999), 11.2sight, the British government passed the Military Service Act. This was a piece of legislation thatimposed mandatory military service on a significant portion of the male population of GreatBritain, specifically all unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 41 aside from the medicallyunfit and members of a few protected professions. Another act, passed in May 1916, imposedconscription upon married men as well, and in 1918 the age limit was raised by another decadeto 51.There were several options that those who fell under the jurisdiction of the MilitaryService Act could resort to in a bid to potentially avoid spending their following years squattingin the mud-caked trenches of France or the blood-soaked sands of the Middle East with a rifle inhand. Those who were served call-up notices could appeal to the government, asking to beexempted from service for a number of reasons. As per the <Application As To Exemption= formthey were required to fill out, they could argue, for instance, that <it is expedient in the nationalinterests that the man should, instead of being employed in military service, be engaged in otherwork in which he is habitually employed= or <that serious financial hardship would ensue if theman were called up for Army services, owing to his exceptional financial or business obligationsor domestic position.=2 Naturally, however, it is only those who applied for exemption <on theground of a conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant services= that havetraditionally been viewed as conscientious objectors (hereinafter referred to as COs).3 As per themost recent estimates, they numbered roughly 20,000 men, and can be further subdivided intotwo groups: a majority of <alternativists=, who accepted non-combat roles in Britain9s war effort,3 While the acronym CO is typically associated with <commanding officer= when used in a military context, I havenevertheless opted to use it here to refer to <conscientious objector= as conscientious objectors themselves as well asBritish society as a whole used it to refer to conscientious objectors both during and after the war.2 A number of these forms are kept at the British National Archives. See, for example, MH 47/8/1/57 at theaforementioned institution.3and a minority of approximately 1,500 <absolutists=, who refused any and all work thatcontributed to the nation9s military efforts.4Given that this thesis is concerned with the <cultural memory= of these individuals, it isnecessary to provide a clear definition of exactly what that term encompasses. Both <culture=and <memory= are rather broad and imprecise terms when employed in an academic context, andthus need to be refined into something more specific to be useful. Thankfully, an exact definitionof cultural memory has been crafted by Jan Assmann, an influential Egyptologist andarchaeologist who, alongside his spouse Aleida Assmann, played a significant part in earlyacademic discourse on the idea of national memory, a closely related concept. Assmann definescultural memory as <that body of reusable texts, images and rituals specific to each society ineach epoch, whose 8cultivation9 seems to stabilize and codify that society9s self-image.=5 In otherwords, it is the collection of symbols that a given culture incorporates into their sense ofcollective identity, binding them together into a unified group. But while this definition mayaptly capture the notion of cultural memory as an object (metaphysical though it may be), I amalso interested in simultaneously treating cultural memory as a process 3 that is to say, notmerely what cultural memory is composed of, but also how the process of composition is carriedout.To this end, I would like to briefly quote the historian Jay Winter, who penned theintroduction of the 2013 edition of Fussell9s The Great War and Modern Memory. Here, Winterasserted that Fussell9s contribution to the study of the First World War lay within <his insight intothe way language frames memory, especially memories of war.=6 When I use the term <cultural6 Jay Winter, introduction to The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2013), x.5 Stefan Berger and Bill Niven, <Writing the history of national memory,= in Writing the History of Memory, ed.Stefan Berger and Bill Niven, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 138.4 Max Hodgson, <Pathologising 8Refusal9: Prison, Health and Conscientious Objectors During the First World War,Social History of Medicine: the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 35 no. 3 (2022): pg. 973.4memory,= this notion 3 memory as both interpreted through and shaped by the very languageused to express it 3 is, in part, what I am signifying. Thus, my own usage of the term <culturalmemory= is perhaps best understood as the shared understanding of past experiences thatbecomes embedded within a group through their continued engagement within a retrospectivecollective discourse.This definition, admittedly, may seem to undermine the importance of the subject thistext is concerned with. After all, all of the WW1 COs have already passed away. If <culturalmemory= requires, as I have just argued, <continued engagement within a retrospective collectivediscourse,= then the development of their cultural memory is a completed process and a finishedproduct. What relevance could it possibly hold now, more than a century after the war ended?We know the facts surrounding the experiences of these individuals, so why does it matter whatthey thought about those experiences, now that they are dead and gone?I argue that it is precisely because they no longer remain that now is the perfect time toconsider their experiences and perspectives. While WW1 COs are no longer capable of engagingwithin a collective discourse, that does not mean that the record of this discourse has beenproperly compiled, as thoroughly as possible, and interpreted by historians. In fact, it might beargued that such a compilation only becomes truly possible when the conversation is <complete=,as the final disappearance of a group from the ranks of the living means that their culturalmemory has assumed, for better or worse, a final and unchanging shape.7 And yet, while itcannot meaningfully grow, it can still degrade, if the sources that constitute its body are lost tothe ravages of time. Thus, if historians wish to extract the maximum possible value from the7 There remains, of course, the possibility that primary sources generated by Britain9s WW1 COs that have not yetbeen considered by historians may be uncovered by scholars pouring through the archives or found by thedescendants of COs among family heirlooms. Indeed, a portion of materials relating to at least one CO, JohnBrocklesby, remain closed at the Library of the Society of Friends until 2028 as part of TEMP/MSS/412/2 due totheir policies on unpublished manuscripts. However, it seems improbable that this, or any other materials not yetexamined, will be substantial or novel enough to significantly change the overall shape of CO9s cultural memory.5experiences and perspectives of Britain9s WW1 COs, it is critical to study the subject now,without further delay, while we are fortunate enough to have a fairly substantial library ofinformation created by these individuals as they sought an understanding of the significance oftheir own experiences. The task of organizing and contemplating these records will allow us tounderstand the world as they understood it and, in doing so, incorporate whatever wisdom theydeveloped into our own approach to life.And what precisely are the insights that might be gleaned from examining theexperiences of Britain9s WW1 COs? By examining sources created by this group near the end oftheir lives in the back half of the 20th century in conjunction with some sources contemporary tothe war itself, this dissertation will argue that their testimony tells the story of a group of peoplewho were single-minded and resilient. No matter what the rest of British society thought aboutthe war, COs never questioned the legitimacy of their stand against it, and they lived with fewregrets. Their reaction to the outbreak of the First World War foreshadowed the eventual attitudeof senselessness that developed in British society, and they steadfastly refused to be complicit inthe bloodshed that followed. Through this clarity of purpose, they were able to remain strong inthe face of adversity and its aftermath, allowing them to play a small part in reshaping Britishsociety for the better by clearing a path for their successors in the British anti-war movement.Above all else, Britain9s WW1 COs demonstrated to the world that a government cannot trulyforce its citizens to fight a war on its behalf without the consent of those citizens, and that agovernment that tries is bound to face passionate resistance from those that recognize the valueof independent choice.6Chapter 1: The Development of Contemporary British Perspectives on World WarOneIn 2022, a third film adaptation was produced of Erich Maria Remarque9s iconic anti-war novelAll Quiet on the Western Front, following versions released in 1930 and 1979. Although thenarrative follows a young fictional German soldier by the name of Paul, the story in its variousincarnations has garnered considerable attention all over the world. As such, even though AllQuiet on the Western Front focuses on the experiences of soldiers from a nation that wasBritain9s enemy at the time, the story has typically resonated deeply with Britons. As argued inone review of the film from centre-left news publication The Guardian, <for generations ofBritish readers, the story [has] provided the symmetrical complement to similar agony behind theAllied lines, a book read in tandem with, say, Wilfred Owen9s poetry.=8 An examination ofvarious reviews for this adaptation suggests a particularly grim perception of the First World Warpredominates among the British populace, surpassing even the boundaries of political alignment.The socially liberal Independent asserts that <War is hell. We know that by now, certainly beyondany doubt,=9 while the conservative Telegraph offers up a slightly broader <Violence may behell.=10 A review from The Observer, a sister publication to the Guardian, portrays WW1 as <awar that was fought, in filth, vermin and desperation= wherein <lives [were] sacrificed on thewhims of powerful, thick-skinned men,=11 a slightly more acerbic statement than The11 Wendy Ide, <All Quiet on the Western Front review 3 extraordinarily potent German first world war drama, <October 15th 2022, Guardian,10 Ed Power, <Netflix9s German-language All Quiet on the Western Front is a haunting revelation,= Telegram,January 19th, 2023,https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/quiet-western-front-netflix-review-eerily-beautiful-new-take.9 William Stottor, <8All Quiet on the Western Front9 is a Harrowing Depiction of War: Review,= Independent,October 31st 2022,https://www.independent.co.uk/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-is-a-harrowing-depiction-of-war-review.8 Peter Bradshaw, <All Quiet on the Western Front review 3 anti-war nightmare of bloodshed and chaos,= Guardian,October 12th 2022,https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/12/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-review-anti-war-nightmare-of-bloodshed-and-chaos.7Independent9s reference to <the senseless loss of lives'' during the war. Lurking within theseremarks is a palpable attitude of sorrow and disgust, perhaps even genuine regret. If thesereviews are representative of the general consensus held within British cultural memory, theyindicate that Britons have undergone a process of disillusionment. They now primarily regard thewar as a tragic period of carnage. To some members of this society, the conflict was not justified,an opinion acknowledged by former British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014 during aceremonial speech commemorating the centennial anniversary of the war. During his speech, theleader expressed concerns that <Too often it has been dismissed as a pointless war, fought bypeople who didn't know why they were fighting.=12There is a specific underlying assumption colouring this perspective that frequently goesunquestioned. Modern Britons, at least those with a casual grasp of history, seem to believe thatthe way they picture the First World War is a wholly accurate image, and that the way that theyfeel towards the event mirrors the sentiments of those who personally experienced the conflict.They cannot really be blamed for this, as there is an understandable logic to this attitude. Thelayperson in Great Britain thinks, after all, that they have been exposed to enough solid evidenceto support this viewpoint. Consider, for example, The Guardian9s reference to the poetry ofWilfred Owen. Owen, who tragically lost his life in 1918 just days before the conflict ended, isone of the most well-known First World War poets in Great Britain. Here was a man whoseexperience of the war was profoundly visceral, whose experience of the conflict was so intimatethat it led to his death. Surely, then, there can be no opinion on the war imbued with greatervalidity than his, and his picture of war calls to mind <Only the monstrous anger of the guns,12 <David Cameron makes moving speech as lights go out to mark WW1 centenary,= Standard, August 4th 2014,https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/david-cameron-makes-moving-speech-as-lights-go-out-to-mark-ww1-centenary-9648074.html.https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/15/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-review-extraordinarily-potent-german-first-world-war-drama.8Only the stuttering rifles9 rapid rattle= and <The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells.=13 Thishorrific stock image of war is not only the same image presented by All Quiet on the WesternFront, but the same image presented by the vast majority of British First World War narrativesover the last century. Unlike the layperson, however, historians recognize that this picture of waris a caricature. There is a kernel of truth to it, certainly, but it is distorted and overemphasizes notmerely the ugliest features of the war, but specifically features which were largely confined tospecific temporal and geographic boundaries 3 in particular, the area of the Ypres Salient inBelgium near the end of 1917.14 A brief survey of works by historians that consider Britishmemory of the First World War will illuminate how various forces in British society contributedto the development of this oversimplified portrayal of the First World War.As previously mentioned, the first notable entry into the compendium of academic worksto analyze the way that British society came to remember the First World War is Paul Fussell9sThe Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, a veteran of the Second World War who wasadmittedly a professor of literature rather than a historian, attempts to unpack and assess <theway the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical andartistic determinants on subsequent life.=15 His personal academic background explains whyFussell9s analysis centered largely upon the prose of Britain9s war poets, such as Owen and hiscompatriot, Siegfried Sassoon. Fussell argues that the high degree of public awareness of theseworks and their vivid portrayal of the war from the perspective of the soldier, viscerally engagedwith the realities of battle and the trenches, allowed for <novelists and poets too young to haveexperienced it [the war] directly… [to] transform the war into a 8subject9 and simplify its motifs15 Winter, introduction to Great War and Modern Memory, xv.14 Daniel Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, (Hambledon and London: London and New York, 2005), 4.13 Wilfred Owen, <Anthem for Doomed Youth= in Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153.9into myths and figures expressive in the modern existential predicament.=16 This basic argumentitself 3 the idea that cultural memory is preserved through a society9s reinterpretation of the artgenerated concurrently with and as commentary on a given moment 3 both supports and issupported by the staying power of WW1 poetry. However, Fussell9s analysis is too narrow to betaken without a grain of salt.17 The words of a small quantity of artistically-inclined upper-classsoldiers, even if widely circulated among their countrymen, cannot singlehandedly explain whyBritons remain so fixated upon their morbid picture of the First World War, no matter how vividand memorable their prose may be.Taking up the torch from Fussell roughly twenty years later, two historians 3 AdrianGregory and Jay Winter 3 began the search for other possible influences upon Britain9s memoryof the war. In 1994, Gregory published The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946, amonograph which examined British memorialization of the conflict during the interwar periodthrough the lens of ritualistic commemoration, rather than through the legacy of war-eraliterature. Gregory undertook this analysis with the explicit belief <that the memory of the warwas not constant and that in fact it was being reshaped by political, diplomatic and economicevents during the inter-war period, rather than shaping them.=18 If Fussell presented the culturalmemory of the war as something expressed and contained within the medium of art, Gregoryinstead argues that the meaning of the war was a topic, and perhaps even a venue, for publicdebate, at least initially, and he used the discourse surrounding the cultural significance ofArmistice Day in the 1920s and 1930s as proof of this fact. Ultimately, he finds that Britishmemory <stressed civilian, particularly women9s, sacrifice through bereavement. It aimed to18 Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946, (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), 9.17 For a comprehensive review of Fussell9s work and an overview of the academic discourse regarding this text, seeLeonard V. Smith9s article <Paul Fussell9s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-Five Years Later, = inHistory and Theory 40, no. 2, (2001), 241-60.16 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 1975. Reprint, (New York: Oxford University Press: 2013),348.10universalize the memory of the war… The ex-serviceman was marginalized in the process.=19Thus, while Gregory demonstrates that the forging of a national cultural memory might be acollective process that unfolds in a variety of different social forums, his work also suggests thatit is not a process that can support multiple divergent end results. The concept of a nationinherently collapses the identities of its constituent citizens into a single amalgamated unit.Consequently, the narratives that a nation strives to perpetuate in its cultural memory mustsimilarly trend towards a simplified story with a single meaning.Jay Winter9s findings in his 1995 work, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The GreatWar in European Cultural History, might be viewed as the natural extension of this viewpoint.Much as a national identity absorbs the identity of its citizens, nations themselves are unifiedunder continental banners of identity. Winter found that the cultural memory of the war in Britainwas not exceptional when compared to other nations, but was rather part of a pan-Europeanparadigm. He argues that <the enduring appeal of many traditional motifs - defined as an eclecticset of classical, romantic or religious images and ideas - is directly related to the universality ofbereavement in the Europe of the Great War and its aftermath.=20 There is undeniable merit tothis idea, given that it provides a clear reason for the well-documented appeal of All Quiet on theWestern Front to Britons. Simultaneously, however, Winter argues that the way Britonsremembered the war could also be a highly personal matter. He stresses that beyond the aestheticand political spheres of public performance, <there was another level on which they lived the8meaning9 of the war. That level was private, sometimes solitary, and frequently hidden fromview.=21 Plainly put, the way that British citizens thought about the war while in groups differed21 Ibid., 224.20 J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.19 Ibid., 161.11from the way they thought about it as individuals. In this sense, Winter might be understood asdrawing a distinction between 8collective memory9 and 8collective remembrance,9 wherein theformer refers to shared conceptions of an event and the latter to expressions of those conceptionswithin the public sphere.While Fussell, Gregory and Winter have focused on understanding what influencedBritain9s cultural memory of the war in terms of the war9s symbolic meaning and in what waysthat meaning has been publicly expressed, other scholars have sought to explore the matter ofhow British cultural memory of the war has changed over the years with regards to the physicaland psychological realities of the conflict and attempted to identify the primary influences thatdrove those changes. For example, in 20059s The Great War: Myth and Memory, Daniel Todmanendeavoured to explain the emergence of six popular narratives regarding the war that he deemsto be <myths= that have entered Britain9s cultural memory. Most of these myths can be foundlurking within the words of the aforementioned reviews of All Quiet on the Western Front: theuniquely filthy physical conditions of the conflict; the manner in which death touched the livesof every British citizen; the incompetence of British leadership; the overall futility of the war; theunified perspective of war poets and the universal disillusionment of veterans. Todman makesexplicit the connections he perceives between contemporary events within a society and changesin their collective memory. For example, in the text9s fourth chapter, <Futility=, he asserts that thenotion that the war was an entirely pointless exercise in bloodshed emerged and re-emerged atseveral distinct occasions throughout the twentieth century, as British citizens becamedisillusioned with the seemingly endless string of international incidents and political tension12that characterised that century, such as the Second World War, the Cold War and Vietnam.22 Theycould not help but allow these conflicts to influence their beliefs about the First World War.Fussell9s influence on this branch of scholarship is still apparent thirty years later withinTodman9s work. While Todman explicitly critiques the flaws he identifies in The Great War andModern Memory, he also, like Fussell, finds that due to the influence of literature, Britons cameto view the war as less of a series of concrete events and more as a mythologized assortment ofsymbols bearing philosophical significance. As he argues, it became the case that over the courseof the century, for the most popular pieces of British media about the First World War, <a keyelement is not how accurately it depicts the war in historical terms, but rather how easily otherscan use it to bolster their own preconceptions.= The actual details of what happened during thewar lost relevance as British society instead came to focus on what they believed to havehappened, and subsequently what ideas they could generate and support based on thisinterpretation of the conflict9s significance to the national identity.One particularly relevant <myth= in British cultural memory pertains to the publicresponse to the war during the conflict. Broadly speaking, modern Anglophone society tends to<remember= the war as being a grim, bloody duty waged by the masses first out of enthusiasm,and then out of obligation, albeit with little active complaint in the latter stage. And yet, FirstWorld War historians have occupied themselves debating both the extent of and the reasonsbehind any militaristic enthusiasm demonstrated by British citizens. In terms of public supportfor the war, historian Catriona Pennell has argued that at the onset of the war in 1914, the supportof the average Briton for the war was <very often carefully considered, well-informed, reasonedand only made once all other options were exhausted. By August 4 people supported the war, but22 Todman, The Great War, 136 & 142-143.13only because they felt it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.=23 But arriving at adecision does not necessarily indicate a smooth decision-making process. Pennell stresses thatthis support was accompanied by mixed emotions, at times contradictory, ranging from <anxiety,excitement, fear, enthusiasm, panic, uncertainty and criticism… Often they were felt at the sametime, or at the very least, within hours, days, or weeks of each other.=24 British civilians mayhave largely supported the decision to go to war, but support and enthusiasm are not one and thesame.Regarding the reaction of those who enlisted immediately to serve in the war, historianDavid Silbey9s The British Working Class and Enthusiasm For War, 1914-1916, published in2005, argues that both social historians and military historians have been overly reductive on thematter of Britain9s pre-conscription volunteer soldiers, asserting that by <treating the volunteersas a herd, historians have been able to apply a single motivation to them, often an emotional,even irrational one.=25 Rather than merely being motivated by sentimental patriotism, he insteadposits that working-class Britons had a multitude of additional reasons to volunteer for armedservice, including a desire to see the world, the opportunity of an escape from the monotony oftheir home and financial incentives. Still, while these motivations seem perfectly reasonable asthe logic behind taking up any ordinary sort of job, our retrospective knowledge of the war9shefty death toll raises the question of whether exotic sights and a full wallet were worthgambling with one9s life. As such, the way that Britain came to remember the war ischaracterized by a sense that the working-class soldiers who willingly went to war with such<petty= materialistic motivations were acting irrationally. As Silbey notes, over time we have25 David Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916, (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 2.24 Ibid., 227.23 Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain andIreland, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.14become prone to conclude that <some of the enlistees9 decisions look foolish= even though <thissort of retroactive evaluation slips worryingly into the ahistorical.=26Silbey also makes an intriguing argument regarding the motivation behind the MilitaryService Act. He argues that one of the primary reasons that conscription was enacted in 1916 wasbecause <the government and society believed that a pool of shirkers existed. They lookedaround for a solution. The simplest seemed compulsion.=27 However, other scholars, such asBet-El, have traditionally emphasized the need for industrial and military manpower coupledwith low rates of volunteerism to explain Britain9s turn to conscription.28 As such, the idea thatconscription came about as a direct punishment for men who did not volunteer to serve, ratherthan simply being the result of a genuine need for soldiers, has not gained much traction amonghistorians besides Silbey.In fact, other scholars have taken the opposite route to Silbey and highlighted thepresence of anti-war sentiment in Britain during the war. One such historian is Brock Millman,whose Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain suggests that the intensity ofefforts to resist the war while it was ongoing have been historically downplayed, partially due to<a selective memory and a bad conscience. Most of those personally engaged on the governmentside left little record of their activities against dissent.=29 If Millman9s argument is to be believed,it suggests that one of the factors that resulted in the popular belief that Britain9s wartimepopulation (with the exception of conscientious objectors and their allies) whole-heartedlyaccepted the necessity of the conflict was the absence, or arguably even the active suppression,of materials preserved that were capable of supporting alternative narratives. Consider, for29 Brock Millman, Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain, (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 3.28 Bet-El, Conscripts, 11-13.27 Ibid., 32.26 Ibid., 127.15example, Millman9s conclusion that <Reaction, if not revolution, was always incipient during1918, and may well have been months, if not weeks away, when the war ended 3 suddenly andunexpectedly 3 in November.=30 While historians can never really prove beyond a doubt whatcould have happened if things went differently 3 even if such exercises can occasionally producecompelling works of fiction 3 the possibility of a British anti-war revolution in 1918 would seemludicrous to the modern British citizen, as a result of how British society has come to rememberthe war as a unifying mutual struggle.Now that we have covered several of the narratives that have come to dominate Britishmemory of the war, we must also consider how those narratives rose to this state of supremacy.As previously mentioned, Daniel Todman pointed towards the Cold War and other 20th-centuryinternational conflicts as a possible explanation for why Britons bought into the claims thatretroactively classified the war as futile. Other historians have discussed literature and otherforms of art as a medium for the movement of the war into the symbolic realm. This does not yetexplain, however, exactly when British society came to a unified consensus on how the war wasto be remembered, with little room for dissenting interpretations, although as mentioned Gregoryand Winter offer arguments as to why this unification was more or less inevitable. Thankfully,shocking though it may be given the infrequent nature of general consensus among academics,this is a question that historians have found an answer to: stage musicals and comedy television.In Memory, Narrative and the Great War: Rifleman Patrick MacGill and theConstruction of Wartime Experience, historian David Taylor argues that Joan Littlewood9s 1963stage play <Oh, What a Lovely War!=, its subsequent film adaptation, and the infamous 1989British television show <Blackadder Goes Forth= were both responsible for transforming British30 Ibid., 304.16cultural memory of the war into its modern incarnation.31 These two pieces of media bothportrayed the war in a darkly comical fashion, envisioning the conflict as a senseless affairconducted in order to satisfy the whims of clueless, glory-hungry military leaders. The possibleconnection between these two notable British cultural touchstones has not gone unnoticed.Todman argues that <A clear line of descent can be drawn from the generals of Oh! What aLovely War to those in Blackadder Goes Forth.=32 Simultaneously, however, they are bothproducts of the unique socio-political landscape in which they were produced.In The Unquiet Western Front: Britain9s Role in Literature and History, Brian Bondargues that <Oh! What a Lovely War!=9s cynical depiction appealed to British audiences in the1960s due to a number of contemporary concerns festering within British society at the time,including <a pervasive fear of all-out nuclear war= as well as <the emergence of an independentyouth culture= and a number of high-profile government scandals.33 These issues primed Britishcitizens to question any interpretational framework of the First World War that failed to whollycondemn the conflict as an utter farce, thereby bringing the overall attitude of Britons closer tothe stance originally held by many COs during the war. And if Oh! What a Lovely War started awave of British miscomprehension of WW1, Blackadder Goes Forth added fuel to the fire. Ithad such a prodigious impact upon British perception of the war throughout the 1990s that whenfaced with a documentary about Douglas Haig, the First World War general who served as thebasis for Blackadder9s blundering caricatures of the British army9s upper ranks, a number ofcritics used Blackadder as the yardstick with which to measure the documentary9s accuracy.3434 Ibid., 79.33 Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain9s Role in Literature and History, (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002), 51-52.32 Todman, Myth and Memory, 116.31 David Taylor, Memory, Narrative and The Great War: Rifleman Patrick MacGill and the Construction of WartimeExperience, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 31.17The widespread influence of these works on the British perspective of the war is probablyalso connected to advancements in the distribution systems of mass media during the 20thcentury, ensuring that these works reached a wider audience, as well as the comparatively lessereffort required on the layperson9s part to watch a play or movie than to read a longer, moredetailed account of the war. After all, Bond notes that Oh! What a Lovely War9s film adaptationresulted in <a sensation world-wide when first screened in 1969, and has been described as 8theperfect TV extravaganza9, not least because of its all-star cast.=35 And while fellow historianGary Sheffield may believe that the film adaptation is <inferior as art= to Littlewood9s originalplay, Sheffield too agrees that the work <came to symbolise for many people the essential 8truth9about the First World War.=36 Sheffield also credits various television documentaries producedfor British audiences on the subject of the First World War throughout the second half of thetwentieth century, such as The Great War and 1914-1918, as major factors in the publicperception of the war.37 Ultimately, then, it was commercial success in the era of television thatsolidified this particular version of the war with its immense cultural staying power.37 Ibid., 40-41.36 Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities, (Sharpe Books, 2018), 38, Kindle.35 Ibid., 66.18Chapter 2: Three Branches of Historical Thinking on Conscientious ObjectorsEven as Britain9s retrospective lamentation of the war intensified, interest in the trials andtribulations of COs, the earliest vocal dissidents against the conflict, has remained a niche topicamong average British citizens. Interest in their plight has grown considerably among historians,however. Up until the end of the Second World War, only a handful of academic works werecomposed on British COs, such as Conscription and Conscience: A History 1916-1919, writtenin 1922 by John W. Graham (a Quaker chaplain involved with the CO movement), or RobertPollard9s Conscientious Objectors in Great Britain and its Dominions, written in 1945. But thelatter half of the 20th century saw an upswing in CO-centered research, which was probably aresult of the same social factors that Bond used to explain Oh! What a Lovely War9s popularityoperating alongside the rising popularity of social history as a subdiscipline. It may have alsobeen a result of a realization that the population of surviving COs was beginning to thin out asthe First World War drifted further into the past, hastening the need to research this communitybefore the opportunity to collect more samples of first-hand testimony about their lives wasentirely lost to historians.Regardless of the motivation behind this interest, it has resulted in the development ofthree major identifiable (if occasionally overlapping) branches of historical scholarship writtenabout Britain9s WW1 COs. One of these branches has been primarily concerned with therelationship between COs and the rest of British civil society during the war. Another hasnarrowed its focus to the experiences of absolutist COs that were imprisoned as a result of theirdisobedience. The third branch, which emerged most recently, has analyzed the stories of COs inthe specific context of their unique geographic and/or political communities.19One of the earliest examples of texts detailing the relationship between COs and Britishsociety is David Boulton9s 1963 publication Objection Overruled: Conscription and Consciencein the First World War, a work that was described as recently as 2014 as <still the mostcomprehensive available on its subject.=38 Notably, as I will discuss in detail later in this text,Boulton9s work was warmly received by the subjects of his study. This was followed in 1973 byThomas C. Kennedy9s article <Public Opinion and the Conscientious Objector, 1915-1919,=which found that anti-CO sentiment continued to flourish even after the war, resulting in <longterm economic deprivation. C. Os. that had been civil servants, for example, were temporarilybarred from reappointment and absolutists were permanently excluded.=39 This treatmentextended until at least the 1930s, per Kennedy9s findings, although the comparatively benigntreatment of COs in the Second World War led Kennedy to conclude that the British public haddeveloped <a deeper public understanding and tolerance= towards conscientious objection by theoutbreak of this second international conflict.By the late 20th century, British COs earned high praise in at least some circles of Britishscholarship. In 1987, Caroline Moorehead, a British human rights journalist, biographer andhistorian, wrote Troublesome People: Enemies of War: 1916-1986, a monograph which coveredthe topic of 20th-century war resistance in a number of countries. Moorehead spoke to a numberof pacifists in the process of drafting her work, and these personal encounters are likely what ledher to assert on the first page that <There is a stubbornness, an obduracy, about pacifism that canbe infuriating; it can also be heroic, admirable.=40 Her coverage of WW1 COs in particularreveals her personal admiration for their choices, which arguably verges on the point of40 Caroline Moorehead, Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916-1986, (London: Hamilton, 1987), xiii.39 Thomas C. Kennedy, <Public Opinion and the Conscientious Objector, 1915-1919=, Journal of British Studies 12,no. 2 (1973): 118, http://www.jstor.org/stable/175277.38 Liz Willis, review of Objection Overruled: Conscription and Conscience in the First World War, by DavidBoulton, Medicine, Conflict and Survival 30, no. 4 (2014): 309312, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27017863.20hero-worship 3 while discussing one CO, Mark Hayler, Moorehead waxes poetically about thespeech Hayler delivered during his military tribunal, asserting that <there is something verybrave and dignified about his testimony= and claiming that she can practically hear him 3<disheveled, dirty and hungry, an outcast= 3 orating within the military courtroom as she readshis speech decades later from records kept at the Imperial War Museum (IWM).41 Her rhetoric,of course, may be embellished with these touches partly due to its status as popular history, buther admiration for COs is almost certainly genuine and the publication of this work demonstratessome degree of appetite for stories about pacifists among the history enthusiasts of the period.Moorehead9s work also touches on the legacy of British pacifism. In TroublesomePeople9s last chapter, <Witness,= Moorehead discusses several anti-war organizations and eventsof the 1980s. Among them is the story of a peace camp established by anti-nuclear arms activistson the site of an American Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, which began witha small caravan formed by <a group of Welsh women excited by reports they had heard of agathering of women marching in the name of peace from Paris to the Scandinavian countries=42and ultimately led to <30,000 women decorating the fence with banners… a break in along sixmiles of fence; 8blockades9 of the American vehicles; constant <forays= to liberate documents.=43The prominent role played by women in this protest is not particularly surprising, given theenergetic feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. That said, while this serves as proof thatBritish anti-war movements were active beyond the First and Second World Wars, it also servesas a reminder that women are bound to play their own unique role in pacifist movements, just asBritish women during the First World War did. While they were not subject to conscription liketheir male relatives, friends and loved ones, their own sense of ethics and social connections led43 Ibid., 311.42 Ibid., 308-309.41 Ibid., 37.21to women playing key roles in the activities of pacifist organizations and the lives of many COs.Furthermore, their contributions were not confined to the temporal boundaries of the war itself.For instance, Clara Winsten, wife of WW1 CO Stephen Samuel Winsten, accompanied Samuelto his 1976 interview with the IWM. When prompted by the interviewer with the question, <Whydidn9t you think there was a war coming?=, Winsten found himself unable to answer succinctlyand relied upon his wife for an answer, asking her, <At what point, Clare, did you think there wasa war coming?=44On the subject of gender, in 2003, Lois Bibbings chose to examine the public perceptionof COs through a new lens in her article <Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers andConscientious Objectors in the Great War.= Here, Bibbings takes on the vital task of dissectingthe degree to which gendered expectations of behaviour influenced the relationship between COsand the rest of British society. She does this in an explicit attempt <to infiltrate the traditionalheartland of historiography and demonstrate that gender is inherent in all aspects of social,political and cultural life.=45 In the course of this analysis, she finds that COs were painted as a<deviant group who represented an aberrant form of manhood= in comparison to Britain9s<soldier men= who <were heralded for their heroic killings.=46 This was directly related tocontemporary concerns, stemming from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902, that <Englishmanhood was degenerating.=47 There are, however, some curious omissions in Bibbing9sexamination of how British gender roles at the time impacted the fate of COs. For example,although Bibbings notes that some of the tribunal members in charge of overseeing conscientious47 Ibid., 346.46 Ibid., 343.45 Lois Bibbings, <Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in The Great War,=Social & Legal Studies 12, no. 3 (2003): 336, https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639030123003.44 Stephen Samuel Winsten, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, June 29th, 1976, recording, Imperial War MuseumsSound Archive, Catalogue #784, REEL #7, Imperial War Museum, London, England.22objection <saw their role as a patriotic rather than a legal one,=48 Bibbings does not explore whatmotivated the tribunal members to view their duty in these terms, and whether theirdetermination to send COs to the front lines had any relationship with tribunal members9personal sense of masculinity. Furthermore, Bibbings does not address the iconic <white feather=phenomena, a trend in which young women accosted young, unenlisted men in the streets topresent them with a white feather in order to shame them with their cowardice. Still, <Images ofManliness= is a thoughtful piece of scholarship which paints an accurately multifaceted pictureof the complex and contradictory relationship between COs and British society. Bibbings pointsto several accounts from British military officials who expressed sympathy and respect for COs,as well as literary works that drew comparisons between COs and Jesus Christ himself andaccounts from COs that considered themselves patriots despite the scorn subjected upon them bytheir countrymen.Historical works focused on the unique experiences of imprisoned COs began to appeararound the turn of the century. Victor Bailey9s 1997 article, <English Prisons, Penal Culture andthe Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895-1922=, suggests that the brutal treatment of COs in prisonduring the war and their subsequent reporting of said treatment within the public sphere, was atleast a partial factor behind the British prison reforms that began to materialize at the tail end ofthe titular period.49 In 2004, testimonies from British WW1 objectors comprised the first sixentries in Peter Brock9s These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs byConscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War, wherein Brock, a dedicatedhistorian of pacifism, showcases their stories while offering his own commentary. The result issomething of a comparative study; by grounding British WW1 COs thusly, Brock establishes49 Victor Bailey, <English Prisons, Penal Culture and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895-1922,= The Journal ofBritish Studies 36, no. 3 (1997): 300, https://doi.org/10.1086/386138.48 Ibid, 343.23them as the benchmark against which other COs who were imprisoned might be measured.Intriguingly, Brock takes the uncommon stance that these pacifists <were not singled out forespecially rough treatment; towards the end of the war the government even conceded them afew privileges not granted to common criminals.=50 Brock also discusses the prison experiencesof British COs in his essay <Prison Samizdat of British Conscientious Objectors in Two WorldWars.= Here, he found that these 8samizdat9, or dissident journalistic publications both written byand circulated among the imprisoned COs, provided valuable insights into the mindsets of theirproducers but also had an <elitist character= and were circulated only amongst <a small groupwith special concerns of its own.=51 They were not representative of all COs, and this is a rarereminder that even the minority of absolutist COs cannot be treated as a monolithic entity,despite being unified in their staunch rejection of the war.The most recent example of historical scholarship centred on the prison experiences ofCOs is likely Max Hodgson9s article <Pathologizing 8Refusal9: Prison, Health and ConscientiousObjectors during the First World War,= published in 2022 in the Social History of Medicine. As awork synthesizing social history and medical history, Hodgson9s text was written with the aim offixing the issue that <over a century on from the conflict little is known about the ways in whichthe experiences of COs in prison affected their physical and mental well-being, or the extent towhich the British wartime state engaged with objectors9 health.=52 In the process, Hodgsonaddresses some of the same questions about gender anxiety as Bibbings. He argues that COswere subject to <articulation as 8physical… non-entities9, 8effeminate, anaemic men9.=53 Indeed,53 Ibid., pg. 980.52 Hodgson, <Pathologising Refusal,= 975.51 Peter Brock, <Prison Samizdat of British Conscientious Objectors in Two World Wars= in Against the Draft:Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War, (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2006), 230, https://doi-org.qe2a-proxy.mun.ca/10.3138/9781442627215.50 Peter Brock, These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from theGreat War to the Cold War, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 14.24by framing this emasculation as a form of <pathologizing= COs, Hodgson strengthens Bibbings9assertion that this perception of COs was connected to <anxieties about male degeneration= thathad their roots in <various schools of eugenic thinking.=54The third branch of WW1 British CO historiography, that of pacifism within specificcommunities, has two main elements to consider. The first of these elements is the role ofQuakers. Nearly all works discussing COs call attention to the fact that, in demographic terms,the majority of religious COs were either Quakers themselves or had strong social ties tomembers of this Christian denomination. For example, while detailing the experiences of COFred Murfin in her monograph Conscientious Objectors of the First World War: A DeterminedResistance, Ann Kramer points out that immediately prior to his arrest for non-compliance,Murfin <said goodbye to his Quaker friends, who promised to support him.=55 In fact, Quakershad such a strong influence on the pacifist movement that, disregarding any casualties sufferedby Quakers in the FAU, the war may have actually positively impacted their membership rates.Not all COs with ties to Quakerism necessarily began their wartime experiences with theseconnections; some developed their ties to the Religious Society of Friends during the conflict,such as absolutist George Frederick Dutch, who became a Quaker after the war <when hiswartime experiences solidified his pacifism into a lifelong commitment to peace.=56Some historians have also highlighted the experiences of pacifist Quakers who were notCOs by the strictest definition of the term. In <The Friends9 Ambulance Unit in the First WorldWar,'' Linda Palfreeman demonstrates that the titular organization was able to help some pacifistQuakers reconcile the fact that <they felt the urge to do their duty for their country but struggled56 Peace Pledge Union, <GEORGE FREDRICK DUTCH 1894 - 1976=, The Men Who Said No: ConscientiousObjectors 1916-1919, accessed April 12th, 2023, https://menwhosaidno.org/men/men_files/d/dutch_gf.html.55 Ann Kramer, Conscientious Objectors of the First World War: A Determined Resistance, (South Yorkshire: Pen &Sword Social History, 2013), 77.54 Lois Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during theFirst World War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 112.25to reconcile this with their duty to God, to promote peace and to oppose war, seeking othermeans to settle disputes.=57 Members of this group occupy a unique position; as this organizationwas formed prior to conscription, it could be argued that its members, while pacifists, should notrightfully be classified as COs due to their contribution to Britain9s success in the war takingplace essentially on the front lines of battle. Still, it is reasonable to assume that in the absence ofthe Friends9 Ambulance Unit (FAU), many of them would have been forced to turn toconscientious objection lest they surrender their religious convictions by engaging in combat. Assuch, Quakers who joined the FAU have traditionally been treated as a group ofquasi-alternativists by historians, and their accounts and artifacts have typically been collectedand archived alongside materials from conventional alternativist COs with little distinctiondrawn.The second element that warrants attention in the aforementioned third branch is theAnglocentric nature of most early works on British COs and anti-war sentiments. This is hardlyuncommon for British WW1 history; historians have often openly admitted to focusing theirattention on England and the English population at the expense of the Scots and the Welsh,although there are exceptions such as Adrian Gregory9s The Last Great War: British Society andthe First World War which pay greater attention to regional differences within Great Britain. Thisapplies even to case studies that deal with anti-war movements in small regions, such as KenWeller9s 'Don't be a soldier!' The Radical Anti-War Movement in North London 1914-1918,written in 1985, wherein the author confesses that his work <necessarily bears the imprint of myown local chauvinism.=58 Of course, other historians have sought to legitimize these kinds of58 Ken Weller, 8Don9t be a soldier!9 The Radical Anti-War Movement in North London 1914-1918, (London:Journeyman Press Limited, 1985), 7.57 Linda Palfreeman, <The Friends9 Ambulance Unit in the First World War.= Religions (Basel, Switzerland ) 9, no. 5(2018): 168, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9050165.26municipal or provincial case studies. One such case study is Cyril Pearce9s Comrades inConscience: The Story of an English Community's Opposition to the Great War, written in 2001and focusing on the English town of Huddersfield. Pearce would shortly thereafter articulate ajustification for projects which view COs through a regionalized lens, in his 2002 article<Rethinking the British Anti-War Movement 1914-1918: Notes from a Local Study.= ThereinPearce critiques both wide-scale national studies, for being prone to <[diminishing] specific localanti-war opinion by incorporating it as part of a much grander narrative,=59 as well asperspectives that <become pre-occupied with the COs individual heroism to the point where thestruggle is only seen in those terms.=60 We might surmise that in Pearce9s opinion, amiddle-ground approach that places anti-war sentiment in a local or regional context moreaccurately captures the scope of social and cultural influences and pressures on pacifists. While itis difficult to say whether Pearce9s approach is the 8optimal9 approach, it has certainly generatednew ways for historians to think about COs, potentially challenging conventional narratives. Forexample, Pearce9s study of Huddersfield reveals that <local Quaker contributions to the ranks ofthe COs= were <very small=, although he wisely cautions against drawing too many broadconclusions from his data in the absence of comparative studies.61A number of projects in the last decade have drawn on Pearce9s approach, whileexpanding the geographical focus to include Britain9s other countries. This list includesObjectors & Resisters: Opposition to Conscription and War in Scotland 1914-18, published in2015 by Duncan Robert, who credits Pearce with influencing <my research methods, findingsand conclusions on numbers and classifications of conscientious objectors.=62 Robert62 Robert Duncan, Objectors & Resisters: Opposition to Conscription and War in Scotland 1914-18, (London:Common Print, 2015), 3.61 Ibid., 51-52.60 Ibid., 35.59 Cyril Pearce, <Rethinking the British Anti-War Movement 1914-1918: Notes from a Local Study,= Quaker Studies7, no. 1 (2002): 34.27unsurprisingly finds evidence of several different motivations for anti-war sentiment that existedamong Scots. Foremost among these were the <fundamental pacifist position=, opposed to war inany context, and the leftist <class war position=, held by socialists who considered the conflict tobe a product of capitalism.63 Robert9s coverage of Scottish COs is particularly insightful, as itdemonstrates the nebulous nature of ideology and personal motivation; while quoting theobservations of CO James Millar, Robert brings attention to the considerable success thatimprisoned Scottish socialist COs had in converting other imprisoned COs to their politicalideology.64Aled Eirug produced a similar work in 2018, titled The Opposition to the Great War inWales, 1914-18. Eirug credits Pearce, Duncan and Weller as influences, asserting that his own<study builds on this work to consider the extent to which opposition to the war was not only amatter of individual conscience, but also part of a broader social and political response withinrooted communities.=65 Although Welsh COs comprised a very small body of 901 COs,representing only 0.7% of the total population of Welshmen eligible for conscription,66 Eirug9swork is nevertheless highly important; it calls attention to the multifaceted nature of CO identityand allegiance, which has been insufficiently considered by other historians. As Eirug observes,one objector <defined himself as an ILP-er [Independent Labour Party], a Socialist,Congregationalist and member of the NCF [No-Conscription Fellowship].=67 An ardent belief inpacifism might stem from both a Christian perspective and a socialist one; indeed, these twoparadigms could be interlinked, or from the same life experiences or social connections. Eirugalso highlights the class solidarity of Welsh COs, asserting that <the occupational profile of this67 Ibid.66 Ibid., 150.65 Aled Eirug, The Opposition to the Great War in Wales, 1914-1918, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018),18-19.64 Ibid., 113.63 Ibid., 28.28cohort of men tended to be that of the skilled working class or lower middle class,=68 althoughoddly he does not provide any fleshed-out theories as to why this demographic had the strongestshowing amongst Welsh COs.Finally, the most recent work that follows in Pearce9s footsteps is Angus Wallace9s 2023article <A Community of Consent: Conscientious Objectors on the North Yorkshire Moors andthe North East Coast During the First World War.= In this case study, which focuses on a miningcommunity and studies a surprisingly large quantity of surviving documents from the localtribunals discovered in 2014, Wallace argues that many of the COs from the region were clearlywilling to accept a certain degree of support for the war. Rather than characterizing these men assimply <anti-war,= Wallace submits that historians should recognize the presence of opposition to<military service rather than over working in the national interest,= and the fact that<conscription could be viewed as industrial as well as military.=69 In writing this article, Wallacehas demonstrated the need for historians to broaden their understanding of the motivationsbehind conscientious objection. However, as the vast majority of sources identified andconsulted in the writing of this dissertation reflect the opinions of COs with strong anti-warleanings and ties to pacifist movements and organization, it is those COs who are affordedprimary consideration in my analysis.Yet, despite growing interest from academics, there is still something missing from thiscompendium of scholarly works on COs, in addition to the omission indicated by Wallace. All ofthe works I have mentioned above have emphasized the experiences of COs during the war butnone have given any amount of real consideration to the post-war lives or, even more69 Angus Wallace, <A Community of Consent: Conscientious Objectors on the North Yorkshire Moors and the NorthEast Coast During the First World War,= Northern History 61 (1): 943113, 2023,doi:10.1080/0078172X.2023.2272833.68 Ibid., 153.29importantly, the post-war perspectives of COs. This, I argue, is the logical and vital extension ofthe work undertaken by scholars like Bibbings, Roberts and Eirug to emphasize the breadth ofCO identity, for it addresses the question of identity-fluidity over time. Historian Michael Roperconsiders this question as it pertains to WW1 soldiers in his article <Re-remembering the SoldierHero: the Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War,=wherein he argues that, for a soldier retelling a story from the war multiple times throughout hislife, <the emotional processes connected to the war experience and to present life-dilemmascoalesce in the narrative, revealing the psychic as well [as] the social structuring of memory.=70The changes that arise in the repeated retelling of a war-time memory can thus be explained as apart of <actively managing painful experiences from the past.=71How do these conclusions apply to COs? In a literal sense, the COs who gave interviewsand wrote letters in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s about their war-time experiences were the sameindividuals who personally underwent those experiences. Simultaneously, however, they hadbeen altered on some psychological or spiritual level by the passage of time, like any otherhuman being, and they were no longer quite the same person as they were in their youth. Whatfacets of their younger selves9 paradigms had they held onto, and what contradictions had arisen,perhaps unnoticed by their own eye? Subject to the fallibility of memory and at the mercy of theunrelenting march of time, what do the post-war testimonies of COs reveal about the humancapacity, or lack thereof, to maintain a stable self in the face of past traumas? And ultimately,how did bearing witness to another world war, social and cultural revolution and the loomingthreat of nuclear annihilation contextualize their memories of the First World War and thedecisions of their youth?71 Ibid., 184.70 Michael Roper, <Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: the Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in PersonalNarratives of the Great War,= History Workshop 2000 (50), 200-201, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/2000.50.18130Chapter 3: Memory, Oral History, and a Discussion of SourcesOn March 14th, 1972, a CO by the name of Walter Manthorpe responded to a request in TheFriend, a Quaker publication, by a young woman named Pauline Pollard. Pollard had noted thatshe was writing a history project about WW1 COs, and was looking for information about <whatmotivated COs to testify against war, why they chose the Friends Ambulance Unit, the HomeOffice Scheme, the non-combatant corp [sic], work of national importance, or absolutism; howthey were treated by the tribunals and what reaction they experienced from the public and themilitary.=72 Manthorpe was willing to help Pollard, but first he asked her to provide him with alist of more specific questions for him to answer. This was because he wanted to know if she wasmore interested in the motivations behind conscientious objection, or the experiences COsunderwent, as Manthorpe felt that <the first of these would not take much writing, but the lattercould fill a book.=73 Manthorpe9s statement here is something of an extreme understatement 3 notonly have various scholars written anthologies about the experiences of COs, such as Bibbings9Telling Tales About Men or Brock9s These Strange Criminals, but a number of COs composedthorough, albeit unpublished, manuscripts about their personal war-time experiences. Forinstance, John Brocklesby9s memoir, Escape from Paganism, spends a number of chaptersdiscussing his imprisonment during the war, and H. Blake9s Whose Image and Superscription isa 500+ page memoir of his own time as a CO.74 Thanks to archival materials such as thesemanuscripts, as well numerous oral interviews conducted with COs throughout the years by74 For Escape From Paganism, see TEMP MSS 412, John Brocklesby Papers, Library of the Society of Friends,Friends House, London, England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 454, John Brocklesby Papers). For Whose Imageand Superscription, see LIDDLE/WW1/CO/08, Blake, H., Peter Liddle Collection (First World War), University ofLeeds Special Collections, University of Leeds, Leeds, England (hereafter cited as Peter Liddle Collection).73 Walter Manthorpe to Pauline Pollard, March 14th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Correspondence between PaulinePollard and former World War 1 Conscientious Objectors, Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, London,England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence).72 Pauline Pollard, <Conscientious Objection in the First World War,= The Friend, February 4th, 1972.31institutions such the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, we are fortunate enough to have afairly weighty record of CO experiences.But materials of this ilk 3 by which I mean recollections of the war composed ordelivered after it had ended 3 pose difficulties for some historians. Some scholars who have aparticular affinity for notions of objectivity would probably argue that they are less authenticthan accounts contemporaneous with the war, being sullied by hindsight and external narrativesand blurred by the impermanence of memory. The impact of hindsight is certainly a validconcern. As Taylor rightly observes, <Memory is present (and present-problem) oriented even asit looks to the past.=75 Furthermore, Taylor suggests, the recollection of memory is heavily tied tothe construction of autobiographical narratives, which are not only <ongoing and unfinishedrather than final and authoritative= but also <a fictional construct, albeit concerned with realityand truth… shaped by its socio-cultural context and the dynamic between audience and writer.=76Undoubtedly, then, the accounts provided by respondents to Pollard9s request in The Friend ordelivered in IWM interviews were influenced not only by the chronological gap between theevents and the recollections, but also the perception COs had of both themselves and theiraudience as well as the general state of British society in the 1970s and 80s, which held, aspreviously discussed, a wildly different opinion on the First World War than when the COs tooktheir stand against it in the 1910s.The oral interviews, in particular, pose their own challenges when compared to thewritten retrospectives. As historian Lynn Abrams observes, there are additional layers to considerwhen working with oral histories, as <oral historians are not just interested in what is said but76 Ibid., 59.75 Taylor, Memory, Narrative and The Great War, 54.32also how and why it is said.=77 Obviously, these questions arise when any type of source, oral orotherwise, is under the scrutiny of a competent historian. But when it comes to oral history, thesequestions take on entirely new dimensions. Written sources usually originate from individualswho typically have the luxury of time when composing their accounts. They can spend that timechoosing their words carefully, and they have the option to erase and/or rewrite their remarksduring the initial process of composition if they decide they do not like what they have written.Consequently, there is purpose and intent, of some kind or another, behind every single wordcaptured in a written document.Oral histories, especially oral interviews, are an entirely different matter. True, underideal and ethical circumstances the individual recounting their history during an oral interviewshould be able to comfortably ask for omissions and redactions from the record if they saysomething they wish they had withheld. And beyond that, interview transcripts will often makeminor adjustments for the sake of clarity and comprehension, such as removing filler words andadjusting flawed grammar. But still, when the words as they were spoken (or very close to it)during an interview are kept accessible for later audiences, they demand a particularly thoroughdegree of attention from the historian. These scholars must be attentive to tone, volume, cadence,signs of hesitation or false-starts that suggest the interviewee, perhaps unconsciously, hasdisregarded their first impulse, reconsidered their initial response, and in an instant changed theirmind about what to say next. And, if the historian happens to be the one conducting the interviewor watching a video recording, rather than listening to a purely auditory recording or reading atranscript, they must also consider the physical responses of their subjects. Abrams raises thepoint that those with traumatic memories might display unease through <changes of voice and77 Lynn Abrams, <Memory as both source and subject of study: The transformations of oral history,= in Writing theHistory of Memory, ed. Stefan Berger & Bill Niven, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 90.33observable body language.=78 These are all elements inherent, by their very nature, to themedium of spoken word and direct interpersonal communication. They are elements that thewritten word, at best, can only faintly approximate.The implications these facts hold for this project are considerable; as previously noted, allWW1 COs have passed away. Thus, all oral histories used to form the basis of my analysis inthis thesis are archival materials rather than personally conducted interviews. On the one hand,those from the IWM were kept in an audio format. As such, they contain the aforementionedelements inherent to the medium which have undoubtedly colored my interpretation of thetestimony within. To claim that I would be able to completely refrain from reading into the tonein which the interviewees spoke would be to credit myself with a degree of objectivity I franklydo not possess. Those originating from the Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds, on theother hand, were only available as written transcripts. And while those transcripts seem to havebeen written with the intention of capturing the words as close to verbatim as possible, theynevertheless do not capture the voices of those interviewed in quite the same fullness.Further complicating the matter of oral history is the question of the audience. Theintended audience of a written history or historical source are rarely present during thecomposition of that source. Consequently, there is a natural distance between the source and theaudience. The intended audience may influence the way that the creator of the source tells theirstory, but not in a fashion that exerts complete control upon them. But oral histories, in contrast,are often composed before an audience and delivered by agents who recognize themselves asengaging in the human tradition of storytelling. At times the audience may even serve as anactive participant in the composition of an oral history, asking questions and encouraging thestoryteller to elaborate upon particular details that specifically catch their interest and thereby78 Ibid., 105.34reflect their priorities. Even if they remain passive and silent, the storyteller is bound to beinfluenced by their very presence. Thus, the audience to whom an oral history is delivered holdsthe potential to shape the telling of a memory almost as much as the person who is activelyengaged in remembering it.In the case of the interviews that form the evidentiary basis for this work, the influence ofthe interviewers on the content discussed by the COs is fairly substantial. One of the primary setsof interviews consulted were conducted by Dr. Peter Liddle from the University of Leeds. Ratherthan allowing his respondents to provide him with information as they saw fit, Dr. Liddle clearlyhad his own particular ideas regarding what information would be valuable to the historic record.Each of his interviews began with him asking the CO he was speaking to tell him when andwhere they were born, and he followed up on that question by asking about their education.While those are fairly natural starting points for a life story, one must wonder whether the COswould have chosen to start with those details if they had simply been invited to begin telling theirstory, rather than being prompted with a closed-ended question. Furthermore, Dr. Liddleinterjected with questions frequently throughout the interviews, seeking clarification orexpansion on remarks made by COs and thereby directing the course of the interview.The other primary set of interviews cited throughout this work were conducted by theImperial War Museum (IWM), by employees named Margaret A. Brooks and Lyn E. Smith.While Brooks and Smith typically also began their interviews by asking the COs to discuss theirearly years, they interjected much less frequently than Dr. Liddle did, often allowing the COs tosimply speak without interruption for four or five minutes at a time. As such, it might be arguedthat the interviews produced by the IWM more accurately reflect the ways in which the COsthought about their experiences independently, while Dr. Liddle9s interviews invited them to35consider aspects of their experiences which may not have naturally occurred to them as meritingdiscussion and exploration.In addition to these interviews, some of the most significant primary sources consulted inthis research project were delivered by surviving male COs who were writing to a female highschool student, Pauline Pollard. And while there is no way of determining exactly how theirperception of Pollard impacted the way that COs chose to tell their stories, there are a fewpossibilities worth considering. In one of his letters to Pauline Pollard, CO Harold Bing,uncertain whether he was accurately quoting something verbatim, parenthetically remarked that<if you are, as I suspect, a Quaker yourself you can easily check.=79 We can safely assume thatBing was not alone among his peers in assuming that because Pollard searched for COs via aletter in a Quaker publication, she was probably herself a Quaker. COs who wrote to herpresumably then tailored their stories under the assumption that they knew their audiences9religious beliefs, even if they had no personal relationship with Pollard. This could havemanifested in any number of ways, ranging from unstated assumptions regarding their sharedknowledge base to the generation of a sense of rapport between storyteller and audience whichfostered honest testimony.Furthermore, research into the social dynamics of oral interviews suggests that genderdynamics may have impacted CO testimonials. Most pertinently, it has been argued that whilemale <interviewees tended to avoid discussing emotion, the women interviewers found it mucheasier to introduce the topic and to encourage the men to open up.=80 We might conclude, then,that these men probably displayed a degree of emotional vulnerability and honesty about their80 Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Bennett and Sari Andajani-Sutjahjo, <The Social Dynamics of the Interview: Age,Class and Gender,= Qualitative Health Research vol. 16 no. 10, December 2006, 1329. While this article wasprimarily focused on oral interviews in the field of medical research, the observations it makes regarding genderdynamics in oral interviews are equally applicable in the context of oral interviews of any nature.79 Harold Bing to Pauline Pollard, February 19th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.36feelings in the course of these interviews that may not have been granted to a male interviewer.The notion that male interviewees may open up in greater detail to female interviewers is furthersupported, as pertains to this dissertation, by the interviews given by CO Phillip Radley to Dr.Peter Liddle (male) and Margaret A. Brooks (female). When discussing his father with Dr.Liddle, Radley only opted to remark that his father <used to write on pacifist matters if you canput it that way to the paper… he himself lost his job because he refused to do war work and thatwas a tremendous encouragement and stimulant to me.=81 In his interview with Brooks, however,Radley included additional details about the event, specifying his father9s age at the time, and thefact that this event coincided with Radley9s stay in prison. Radley then used this story totransition into telling an anecdote about a letter he received from his missionary uncle.82Above all else, though, oral history struggles with a bad reputation. People believe, fromtheir own first-hand experience, that the human memory is a fickle and imperfect thing.Accordingly, we feel comfortable assuming that oral histories are bound to be distorted byaccidental untruths born from failing memories, and that those distortions must surely beexacerbated by old age and the passage of time. Historians, who are not typically well-versed inthe intricacies of neuroscience, are split on the matter of whether or not this is a genuine truth.David Taylor, for instance, notes that <each remembrance of an event is new and distinct fromearlier remembrances, let alone from the event itself.=83 But Abrams decisively claims <There isno evidence to demonstrate either that people tell deliberate untruths in oral history interviews orthat memory is especially liable to distortion.=84 Any attempt to determine which of these84 Abrams, <Memory as both source and subject,= 92.83 Taylor, <Memory, Narrative and The Great War,= 49.82 Phillip Radley, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, May 25th, 1974, recording, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #642, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.81 Phillip Radley, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, June, 1979, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/076, <Radley, Phillip,= Tape #556(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.37historians is correct on the matter would almost certainly require a lengthy divergence into therealm of complex sciences that is beyond the scope of the author9s expertise.Thankfully, however, answering that methodological question is beyond the scope of thisproject. After all, this analysis is only tangentially concerned with the veracity of CO testimony 3that is to say, CO accounts are equally valuable whether they match the historical record or not,so long as they are not wholesale fabrications without any discernible relationship to the truth.The specific details of their experiences are of far less importance than the question of how theycame to view their experiences and when, how and why they came to those viewpoints; thefactual accuracy of their perceptions only matters in that context. Indeed, the discovery offactually inaccurate statements within CO testimony would be highly beneficial, as it wouldclearly demonstrate the necessity of thoroughly interrogating CO testimony in order to determinewhat factors account for such inaccuracies.Thus, for a project such as this, far from being inferior sources, oral histories are idealdue to their highly personal nature. And while written sources like autobiographies, memoirs orannotated diaries are also highly personal, the written word, as previously discussed, suffers froma degree of separation from the intended audience. Oral histories are typically composed on thespot, in a direct interaction with an audience who serves as a manifestation of the here-and-now.Because of this, no other type of source is quite so capable of demonstrating the ways that peoplemake sense of their past while navigating their present as an oral history.38Chapter 4: Absolutism, Alternativism, Christianity & Classifications: The Stabilityof CO IdentityThe retrospective accounts provided by COs long after the war facilitate investigation intonumerous powerful questions. Two of these questions, regarding the subject of identity, seemparticularly worthy of consideration. First, if autobiographical narratives are, as Taylor argues, <asearch for personal identity=85 then what aspects of their experiences provided the fundamentalbuilding blocks for CO9s sense of self that would last the remainder of their lives? What madethem feel kinship with their fellow objectors, and what parts of their experience did they feel wasuniquely theirs? And, on a related note, is there a discernible gap between the way that COsviewed themselves during the relative peace of their later years versus the turbulent period oftheir youth?I believe that the first step to answering these questions is to consider what is arguablythe most discussed and certainly the most binary aspect of CO identity: the significance of the<absolutist= and <alternativist= labels. As with any pair of binary terms used in the constructionof human identity, there are a number of important variables at play which must be consideredwhen determining both its value and its shortcomings. Who constructed this binary and why? Ismembership in either category assigned externally, or determined by the active choice of thosecontained within it? To what degree is membership in these categories fixed or fluid? How clearare the delineations between one label or the other? Who subverts it, and how does thissubversion manifest?Although identifying the precise origin of the <absolutist= and <alternativist= label islikely a near impossible task, there lies little difficulty in the task of comprehending the meaningof these terms. <Absolutists= were those who insisted that the provision of the 1916 Military85 Taylor, Memory, Narrative and The Great War, 56.39Service Act stating that <Any certificate of exemption may be absolute, conditional ortemporary= meant that absolute exemption should be available to them. <Alternativists= werethose who accepted the alternative of exemption <conditional on the applicant being engaged insome work… of national importance.=86 There is no firm evidence which might be used toidentify the entity or entities responsible for codifying these labels in the public vocabulary. Noris it entirely clear exactly when these labels came into widespread use, although evidencesuggests they were coined relatively soon after the war broke out. The earliest usage of eitherterm identified during the research process for this dissertation is located in the war-time diariesof Sybil White, the wife of a CO, who mentioned having a <good deal of conversation regardingthe Alternativists= in a diary entry dated November 20th, 1916.87 White9s usage of the termsuggests that COs probably did not view being classified as absolutists or alternativists as aninherently oppressive, derogatory or reductive label, given that a CO9s spouse would have beenunlikely to opt-in to a categorization system with negative connotations for her husband. Thus<Absolutist= and <Alternativist= were, to COs and those in their immediate circles, terms devoidof judgement.Still, from the moment that conscription was enacted, COs were clearly and openly awareof the degrees of variation in their collective resistance against the war effort. A documentcirculated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in September 1916, meant to inform theirmembers on the subject of <alternative service=, loosely organized COs into the categories of<Ready to Accept,= <Willing but Prevented,= and <The Man Who Cannot Accept.=88 But eventhough the sense of division among COs may have been apparent to both themselves and their88 Memo, TEMP MSS 62, <Cornelius Barritt Papers=, Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, London,England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius Barritt Papers.)87 Sybil White, unpublished diary, November 20th, 1916, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/099, White, Andrew E. Clarke, PeterLiddle Collection.86 Parliament of Great Britain, <Military Service Act, 1916,= Chapter 104, 2.3, adopted January 27th, 1916.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1916/104/pdfs/ukpga_19160104_en.pdf40peers, that did not stop COs from attempting, at times, to downplay the significance of the gapbetween alternativists and absolutists. This may have been done merely to present a united frontto their detractors and thereby avoid potentially undermining their cause, but it also might havesimply resulted from a worldview that the differences between absolutists and alternativists wereless notable than their commonalities. The latter option was the belief of absolutist E.Williamson Mason, who observed in 1918 that staunch absolutists like himself theoretically<have perhaps the questionable right to call the alternativists traitors, but they do not, for theyalone know through sympathy and experience what their brethren suffered.=89 Notable absolutistCO Archibald Fenner Brockway held a similar viewpoint. Brockway, one of the founders of theNo-Conscription Fellowship, stated in a 1917 letter to the Central Tribunal that he thought <theC.O9s who have accepted Alternative Service feel that protest [against the war] as sincerely asthose who have declined it= even as he explained to the Central Tribunal that he personallybelieved accepting alternative service was the wrong choice.90After the war, presenting a united front of COs was no longer a necessary tactic in anongoing struggle against their detractors. As such, in later years, some COs came to display ablunt acknowledgment of the severity of the ideological disagreement between alternativists andabsolutists. In 1974, absolutist Phillip Radley admitted to feeling that alternativists who hadaccepted the Home Office Scheme were <giving the show away,= although he sheepishly agreedwith an observation from his interviewer, Margaret A. Brooks, that absolutists like himself were,in a sense, <self-righteous.=91 Five years later in 1979, when asked by Dr. Peter Liddle how hehad felt about the alternativists, Radley provided a similar response, stating that <we [absolutists]91 Phillip Radley, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #642, REEL #7.90 Archibald Fenner Brockway to the Central Tribunal, January 17th, 1917, TEMP MSS 977, Arnold S. RowntreePapers, Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, London, England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 977,Arnold S. Rowntree Papers.)89 Brock, These Stranger Criminals, 32.41felt that they hadn9t really understood the principle that we felt we were right in opposing andthat if we had all accepted the Home Office Scheme the principle would have gone.=92Furthermore, unlike Radley, some absolutist COs expressed a sense of moral virtue overalternativists much earlier than the 1970s. Another absolutist, H. Blake, bragged in his 1937unpublished memoir, with an evident sense of pride and superiority, that he suspected he was<the very first one to make the refusal to sign the Home Office agreement.=93 The self-satisfiednature of these words suggests that Blake felt a sense of superiority and greater ethical characterwhen he compared himself against the compromising alternativists.Still, Radley and Blake did not speak for all their absolutist peers when they made thoseremarks. Other COs maintained the same stance of solidarity among absolutists and alternativiststhat they had presented during their wartime struggle no matter how much time had passed. Inhis 1974 interview, Hoare specifies that there was <extraordinarily close comradeship, really. Ihad [it] all the way through, between objectors, all kinds.=94 That same year another absolutist,Frank Merrick, similarly stressed the point that <I don9t think it bothered us. We were so unitedin the main stand that I don9t think we minded very much when the other chap had ratherdifferent reasons for his stand, we were so thankful that he took his stand.=95 This relationshipwent both ways, as it was not merely absolutist COs who acknowledged the validity ofalternativists9 stances. Alternativists also took the time to emphasize their respect for theabsolutist stance, as shown by alternativist Harold Wrigley9s observations in 1972 when heclaimed that absolutists have had all the glamour <and deserve it,= although he also admits to95 Frank Merrick, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, March 15th, 1974, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #381, REEL #2, Imperial War Museum, London, England.94 Joseph Edward Hoare, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, July 29th, 1974, recording, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #556, REEL #5, Imperial War Museum, London, England.93 H. Blake, Whose Image and Superscription?, unpublished manuscript, 1937, 67, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/008, <Blake,H,= Peter Liddle Collection.92 Radley, interview by Liddle, June, 1979, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/076, Peter Liddle Collection.42having felt that alternativists like himself had the right to feel that they <did their bit.=96 BernardG. Lawson, a pacifist who became a member of the Friends9 Ambulance Unit, similarly assertedto Pollard that he:<had every respect (and still have) for the 8absolutionist9 or those who wereprepared to take work under the Home Office Scheme, and very nearly became subject toimprisonment myself. I always felt that, given an acceptable alternative without breakingmy principles, I would be more satisfied taking up some form of work or service whichaimed at lessening suffering and benefiting humanity, in some form which did not resultin actively furthering war aims and which might perhaps give one the opportunity ofsharing in some way the risks and hardships of the soldier - and answering the publicmis-conception that that cowardice lay at the bottom of the pacifist stand.97In the course of explaining his motivations, Lawson unwittingly touches upon the oftenunacknowledged ambiguity, and arguable insufficiency, of the absolutist/alternativist dichotomy.It is clear from his own words that Lawson, despite being a pacifist who saw fit to respond toPauline Pollard9s request for information from/about COs, does not consider himself to be eitheran absolutist or a conventional alternativist. He specifically opted to call attention to thedifference between himself and those who accepted the Home Office Scheme, after all. Lawson9sidentity therefore exists in a nebulous state of flux, as a CO who does not place himself amongthe traditional groupings of absolutist CO or alternativist CO.Similarly, Howard Cruttenden Marten, who persisted in his refusal to work for themilitary even as he was sent to France and sentenced to death alongside other COs (before hissentence was later commuted to 10 years penal servitude), would eventually state that he<wouldn9t say I was what we called a complete absolutist, a 8do-nothing.9 I wasn9t prepared to doanything under military direction or to be exempted in a very restrictive way, but I was prepared97 Bernard G. Lawson to Pauline Pollard, February 28th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.96 Harold Wrigley to Pauline Pollard, March 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.43to do certain work, as I did finally after it was all over=.98 If a man so dedicated to resisting thewar that he was nearly executed for his disobedience ultimately categorized himself as less thana <complete= absolutist, then it is difficult indeed to fathom who would have qualified as a<complete= absolutist. Admittedly, Marten did eventually accept the Home Office Scheme, but itshould be noted that he was initially offered non-combatant service, which he felt amounted to<direct participation in war=99 3 presumably, Marten felt that the work he completed under theHome Office Scheme did not meaningfully contribute to the British war effort. He noted in aletter included in his unpublished memoir and written as a critique of the Home Office Scheme,that <Much of the work done by the C.O9s is similar to that imposed by our penal code,=100suggesting that he felt he would have been doing the same work whether he was imprisoned or ina Work Centre under the Scheme. This line of thinking is likely what caused Marten to laterdescribe himself as not a <complete absolutist= rather than simply labeling himself as an<alternativist.= Thus, while Lawson exists outside the binary of absolutist and alternativist andfalls into neither category, Marten blurs the border between the two conventional types of CO bysomehow falling under the purview of both labels.And there are still more COs that defied strict categorization as absolutists oralternativists as a result of the inherently inconsistent, fluctuating nature of human identity. Theycould view themselves as absolutists at one point in time and alternativists at another. Forexample, George Gillet, who eventually joined the FAU as part of the conditional exemption hewas granted by his local tribunal, recalled later in life that he <found it very difficult to decidewhether to become an Absolutist, like a number of my friends were, or to accept alternative100 Ibid., 155.99 Howard Cruttenden Marten, <White Feather (The Experience of a Pacifist in France and Elsewhere)= unpublishedmanuscript, 1918, revised 1936, 138, TEMP MSS 67, Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, London,England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden Marten Papers.)98 Howard Cruttenden Marten, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, August 5th, 1974, Imperial WarMuseum Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.44service… I compromised feeling rather cowardly because of it.=101 Furthermore, despite the factthat he accepted the alternativist position, he also refers to the <many of us who felt the call toadopt the absolutist position.=102 Gillet, then, serves as an example of an ostensible alternativistwho nevertheless sought to associate himself with the absolutist position when remembering thewar years later. There is a subtle sense of regret lurking in his words, as though he felt that bychoosing to accept alternative work he had made the <wrong= choice, that he should have insteadstood resolute as an absolutist. Joseph Hoare was in a somewhat similar position, but unlikeGillet, Hoare acted upon his uncertainty during the war rather than leaving his future self withregrets. Hoare was initially imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs Prison for three weeks beforeaccepting work with the Home Office Scheme. But, as Peter Brock observed in These StrangeCriminals, Hoare became <increasingly uneasy and with a growing feeling that his place wasback in prison= which led to him abandoning his work centre and returning to prison after beingre-arrested.103 Thus, Hoare spent time as an alternativist before transitioning to an absolutiststance as his feelings on the matter changed in response to new developments.Despite the fundamental issues with using narrowly-defined terms to describe somethingas multifarious as the human condition, the convention of defining COs as <absolutists= or<alternativists= is not a pointless practice. It still serves as a useful starting point for a historianconsidering the experiences of both individual COs and the demographic as a whole, especiallysince COs themselves had internalized this classification system. However, given the ambiguityintroduced by COs like Marten, Gillett and Hoare, it is best that <absolutist= and <alternativist=be treated by historians as merely the two extremes of a sliding scale whereupon COs can beplaced and shifted along as necessary, rather than serving as mutually exclusive labels.103 Brock, These Strange Criminals, 50-51.102 Ibid.101 George Gillet to Pauline Pollard, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.45Just as <absolutist= and <alternativist= need to be considered in more complex terms thana simple binary, so too do some of the other ways in which COs have been classified or dividedinto subcategories. Historians have always been aware that COs were diverse in the nature oftheir personal objections to the conflict and the spiritual and political communities that theycame from. As Lois Bibbings has noted, the religious backgrounds of COs <included Quakers,Christedelphians, Plymouth Brethren, Jehovah9s Witnesses, Methodists, Anglicans and Catholicsas well as a few men of the Jewish faith, some spiritualists, at least one Buddhist and members ofvarious small non-conformist groups.=104 These categories, just like the categories of <absolutist=and <alternativist,= are not as clear-cut as they might appear to be. This is not merely to say thatthey might overlap, although they could and often did. It is also to say that even determiningwhether any given singular label accurately captures the full depth of a CO9s identity can be achallenging task.As an example, let us consider the question of <Which COs were Quakers?= On thesurface, this is a straightforward question, and in the case of many COs it remainsstraightforward. One could not deny that Wilfred Ernest Littleboy, who, in his own words, wasraised <in a very small country town, where there was very few members of the Society ofFriends except our own family, from grandparents to grandchildren, but I went to a Quakerboarding school,=105 was a Quaker. On the opposite side of things, Walter Griffin, who attended aMethodist school but stated that <there was nothing at all religious in my upbringing= and whoeventually, at the outset of the war, found himself practicing a fundamentalist strain ofPentecostalism due to the influence of an evangelist preacher,=106 was in no way, shape or form a106 Walter Griffin, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, June 25th, 1987, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #9790, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.105 Wilfred Ernest Littleboy, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, June 25th, 1974, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #485, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.104 Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men, 37.46Quaker. Consequently, considering Littleboy in the context of his Quakerhood or Griffin in theabsence of the same would be a reasonable and potentially useful undertaking for a historianthinking about COs.But there are also COs with complex religious identities, like Lloyd Howard Fox, a manfor whom the question of Quakerhood is a hard one to answer. When asked in 1988 if he wasfrom a Quaker family, he responded by saying <Yes, Quaker and Plymouth Brethren. My fatheractually was what I always called a 8Pillar of the Church.9 He was a church warden and read thelessons for about forty years.=107 This remark implies that Fox probably spent his younger yearsattending his father9s church, and thereby suggesting that his Plymouth Brethren upbringingshaped his religious beliefs. But Fox also goes out of his way to notify his interviewer that hisfirst cousin is Rachel Cadbury, a member of a prominent Quaker family, and Fox spent the warvolunteering with the Quaker-run Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) as a driver.108 Should ahypothetical historian considering the religious backgrounds of COs include Fox among the listof Plymouth Brethren COs or among the list of Quaker COs? It seems evident that treating Foxas one-or-the-other would be overly reductive. Instead, it is more useful for scholars to treat thereligious beliefs of COs as belonging to categories that might overlap like those on a Venndiagram.Despite the messiness involved in sorting COs by religious affiliation, there remains agood reason why historians have traditionally embraced this method of categorisation; COsthemselves have typically elected to sort themselves into categories based upon this part of theiridentity. They engaged in this process of self-identification not only through their words but alsothrough their actions, both at the time of the war and in the following decades. For example, in108 Ibid, REEL #1 & #2.107 Lloyd Howard Fox,, interview by Lyn E. Smith, March 25th, 1988, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive,Catalogue #10173, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.47his memoir <White Feather=, originally completed just after the war in 1918 and subject only tominor revisions in 1936, Howard Cruttenden Marten immediately follows a list of his fellowCOs with the remark that <Among our number were Friends (Quakers), members of the Churchof England, Free Churchmen, a Roman Catholic… others who adopted the less orthodox butequally sincere faith of Socialism.=109 This is evidence that Marten felt that the religiousaffiliations of his companions were among their most important descriptors. This is hardlysurprising, given the broad importance of one9s religion to one9s overall identity and its role indetermining social circles throughout European history. Religious ties remained relevant duringCO9s time in prison. According to Marten, while imprisoned, Quaker COs like HowardCruttenden Marten took opportunities to engage in their traditional method of worship byholding Friends9 Meetings in their dormitories.110 Participating in mutual worship would havehelped forge an even stronger sense of unity and companionship among Quaker COs, reinforcingthe psychological connections between their religion and their CO status.For many COs, the mental associations between their religion and their past as a CO wasa lifelong connection. As they reached the age where it seemed prudent to begin consideringwhat would happen to their property once they were deceased, a number of Quaker COs chose toassociate their conscientious objection with their religious practice by leaving their memoirs andmementos in the care of the Library of the Society of Friends, entrusting that their legacy wouldbe in good hands under the protection of their religious community. In the letter that he wrote tothe archivist of the aforementioned institution at the time that he donated a collection of letterswritten to him by other Quaker COs, Marten remarked that he felt the letters <reflect a wonderfulspirit of fellowship= offered to him by his peers. He made a further point of acknowledging his110 Howard Cruttenden Marten, <White Feather=, 21, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden Marten Papers.109 Howard Cruttenden Marten, <White Feather=, 30, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden Marten Papers.48awareness of the fact that by presenting these objects to the library, he was granting theinstitution <full power of disposal or retention, as they may see fit.=111 In doing so, Martensurrendered his legacy as a CO to the custody of the Quakers on an institutional level,demonstrating his trust that his fellow Quakers understood the importance of archiving hisexperiences for future generations. Marten9s life as a CO would be forever linked to his life as aQuaker.Furthermore, the way that COs described their experiences, both in contemporary and inretrospective accounts of the war, indicated that during the war itself they developed paradigmsfor interpreting their experiences that focused on religion as a means of not only classification,but of hierarchy. On occasion, some men made negative value assessments towards otherindividuals of differing beliefs. Eric Southall, for example, began one letter he wrote to hismother while imprisoned with the comment that <We have a jew here, fairly strict and veryorthodox. After conversing with him I have an irresistible impression that I have beentransported many centuries into the past.=112 Donald Grant, when describing the character of theCOs that joined him on the Home Office Scheme at Dartmoor prison, spoke of men who had:Every kind of basic reason for being there. Anarchists, Quakers, individualobjectors with one9s own reasons, like myself. Members of the International BibleStudents Association, IBSA, I know the letters of it very well, for I knew that all of themseemed very extreme, heaven and hell, evangelistic, crude theologically, strong in belief,in texts. <Thou shall not kill,= that9s enough. An immense variety.113Marten9s memoir, Southall9s letter and Grant9s vivid, if ambiguously critical, descriptionof the IBSA clearly suggest that associating other COs with their religion is not an anachronistic113 Donald Grant, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, November 4th, 1975, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #711, REEL #8, Imperial War Museum, London, England.112 Eric Pritchard Southall to his mother, February 27th, 1919, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/090, <Southall, Eric Pritchard,=Peter Liddle Collection.111 Howard Cruttenden Marten to John L. Nicalls, July 27th, 1956, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden MartenPapers.49application of thought-patterns developed after the war, but instead an accurate representation ofthe way COs mentally classified themselves and others at the time of the conflict.To a certain extent, then, it seems like a safe practice for historians to think about COs interms of their religious beliefs. Even if one dismissed the opinion of COs themselves on thematter, it could probably be taken for granted that the perspectives of non-Christian COs,whether atheist, agnostic, or members of an entirely different religion, differed meaningfully insome capacity from the perspectives of Christian COs, given the degree to which religiousupbringing tends to shape one9s worldview. And when it comes to Christian COs, it is temptingto assume that the variations in doctrine among the different Christian denominations might besignificant factors in shaping the unique perspectives they held.There is evidence to suggest that it certainly shaped their experiences, since Quakers arewell-documented as having provided significantly more material and emotional support to COsthan most other Christian denominations. While Quakers stood against the war, the majority ofChristian denominations did no such thing, a fact that did not escape the notice of COs amongtheir congregations. CO Harold Wrigley felt it was important to mention that <the CoE (Churchof England) as usual accepted the war as a just war, as did the other denominations.=114 Wrigley9sanecdotal testimony here is well-supported by the work of historians, some of whom take hisarguments even further. Albert Marrin noted that the Church of England was the church withconnections to the <dominant classes in [British] society= and, consequently, held the most swayin British society in terms of religious organizations.115 Marrin actually argued that, for membersof the Church of England, <the just war… broke down under the pressure of modern machinewarfare, being replaced by the crusade, an older, more dangerous, but emotionally more115 Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War, (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1974), viii.114 Harold Wrigley to Pauline Pollard, March 1st 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence..50satisfying concept.=116 There were, of course, some dissenting opinions within the institution, butthey were uncommon. Another historian, Edward Madigan, concluded that the handful ofanti-war CoE ministers he could identify from this period were <exceptional, however, andChurch support for the war remained both public and virtually unanimous.=117And yet, this lack of support from mainstream church authorities failed to deter ChristianCOs of any denomination. Indeed, if the words of COs themselves are taken into consideration, itseems that although the unique aspects of individual Christian denominations may have shapedsome aspects of their life as a CO, it rarely played a decisive role in guiding the initial decisionof Christian COs to object to the war.Instead of taking their moral and political marching orders from organized religion, it wastheir own individual interpretation of Christianity, that led Christian COs to object. For instance,CO Alfred Evan Williams recalled in his IWM interview that early in life he had been a choirboyfor the Church of England, before his father had his family converted to Catholicism. Hisdescription of his religious beliefs during the war, however, was that he had <a belief inChristianity, if you like. Christianity, modified by the light of personal thinking andexperience.=118 His opinion of organized religion was quite dire; when his interviewercommented that it was common for Church of England clergymen to speak in favour of the war,Evans remarked that <you can always count on clergymen to do that.=119 Another Christian CO,Dr. William Cormack, was raised in a Baptist family that left the church after the war beganbecause <they were so shaken by the attitude that all the churches took up to war that they left119 Ibid.118 Alfred William Evans, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, May 15th, 1974, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #489, REEL #4., Imperial War Museum, London, England.117 Edward Madigan, Faith Under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War, (Hampshire: PalgraveMacMillan, 2011), 37.116 Ibid., 252.51the church.=120 This led to Cormack following in their footsteps; he abandoned organized religionentirely, stating in 1972 that he had <never been ever since that a member of any organisedreligious body or church.=121 This does not mean that Cormack abandoned Christianity. Hispersonal relationship with Christianity still helped shape his choices; when Dr. Peter Liddleasked during an interview with Cormack if his objections had been both religious and political innature, Cormack replied in the affirmative.122It should be stressed that the peculiarities of their religious convictions did not escape thenotice of COs. One CO, Harold Bing, cut right to the heart of the matter when he observed in1972 that <Those who became COs generally did so as a result of their own individual reading ofthe New Testament.=123 Looking closely at his phrasing, one might be tempted to wonder ifperhaps Bing ever had the opportunity to read the manuscript of fellow objector H. Blake9smemoirs; in this document, Blake provides a verbatim copy of his response to the standardquestions asked of COs in their exemption applications, where he specifically says that he has<an objection to war, participation in which I believe to be wrong & unchristian according as Iinterpret the teachings of Christ as contained in the New Testament.=124 In any case, thesedescriptions are very much in line with the fact that, generally speaking, COs tended to proudlydescribe themselves as a rebellious and non-conformist demographic. Although he did notpersonally view himself as a member of this subgroup of COs, Howard Cruttenden Martenseems to have had nothing but praise for:a very curious group of what I used to call the 8artistically-minded CO.9 There were a lotof men who were not in any way organized or attached, but I should call them the124 Blake, Whose Image and Superscription?, 1937, 28. LIDDLE/WW1/CO/008, <Blake, H.,= Peter LiddleCollection.123 Harold Bing to Pauline Pollard, February 19th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.122 Ibid., Tape #60 (transcript.)121 Ibid.120 Dr. William Cormack, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, August, 1972, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/022, <WilliamCormack,= Tape #53 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.52aesthetic groups 3 artists, musicians, all that. And there were quite a considerable numberof them… They had a terrific repugnance at war which could only express itselfindividually. You see, artists and musicians and people of that caliber are verypersonally-minded. They9re not group-minded. They9re individualists at the core. Sonaturally they would almost invariably take a very personal attitude to that sort ofthing.125Although he made those remarks in the 1970s, Marten9s eagerness to highlight therebelliousness of his fellow COs was not the product of any change in mentality over thedecades. In his White Feather, Marten boasts of:thousands of men determined to withstand the pressure that was thus brought to bear inorder to compel them to accept military service against their most cherished convictions.Men of various schools of thought and religious belief were represented, but all met oncommon ground in their refusal to surrender their conscience to the keeping of themilitary authorities.126All in all, then, the manner in which COs thought about themselves in terms ofpersonality and beliefs is exactly what one would expect from a group of persecuted menfighting against the expectations and judgements of their countrymen. Although somewhatparadoxical, they focused on the ways in which they differed from one another, thereby bothallowing them to foster a sense of unity by calling attention to the breadth and diversity of theirmovement, and also bolstering their sense of personal conviction by reassuring themselves that,if it came down to it, they could stand on their own against the rest of British society for reasonsthat were uniquely theirs.Still, as much as COs may have wanted to develop a sense of personal strength nourishedby their own convictions, many COs found that, among their peers, there were particularcharacters that served as strong influences upon their morale. Among the 16 men who were sentto France alongside Howard Marten, Jack Foister remembered Adam Priestly as <the most126 Marten, White Feather, 6, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden Marten Papers.125 Marten, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #2.53sensible,= Harry Stanton as <the bravest of the group,= and Marten himself as sincere albeitsomehow uniquely vulnerable.127 Frank Shackelton, in his autobiography, recounted a momentwhen one of their group, whom he refers to as <S,= quoted Tennyson9s poem <Crossing the Bar=with such poignant timing as to generate <such an effect= upon him that no other rendition of thesame poem was ever able to compare.128 Presuming that Shackelton used the actual initials of hiscompanions when anonymizing their identities, <S= refers to either Stanton or a man namedHarry Scullard. If the former, this perhaps explains why Foister found Stanton to be the mostcourageous among their companions, as Shackleton9s memoir described several occasionswherein <S= displayed a stalwartly cheerful attitude towards their situation. This phenomenon oflatching on to fellow COs for inspiration was not exclusive to the COs in the most direcircumstances (that is, those sent to France and nearly executed.) H. Blake described one of hiscompanions, a man with the surname Runham-Brown, asthe possessor of one of the most beautiful characters which it has been my good fortuneto encounter, & had I no other gains to record in this narrative I should still regard theprivations & sufferings through which I passed as worth while. His tranquility of mind &calm serenity under all provocations, & his tolerance of all opposing opinion, are trulywonderful, & a delight & inspiration to behold, for one of such a fiery disposition asmyself.129It is, of course, worth observing that even as he sung Runham-Brown9s praises, Blakestressed the severe gap in their dispositions. But equally important is the fact that COs, like anyother group of individuals thrown together by a mere similarity of circumstances, did not alwaysmanage to treat their differences as a good thing. Blake similarly stressed the individuality of129 Blake, Whose Image and Superscription?, unpublished manuscript, 59, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/008, <Blake, H.,=Peter Liddle Collection.128 Frank Shackleton, <All my Tomorrows,= unpublished manuscript, 109, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/084, <Shackleton,Frank.,= Peter Liddle Collection.127 Jack Foister, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, July, 1976, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/032, <Foister, Jack= Tape #388(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.54another of their comrades, a man named Simons, although in Simon9s case Blake admits that hefound the differences between them to be both a blessing and a curse.130In any case, exposure to a diverse and opinionated set of individuals with which theyshared a critical point of commonality of belief certainly had an impact on the many COs whofound themselves finding new perspectives and values to assimilate into their worldview. Formany Christian COs, this led to a newfound appreciation for leftist politics and/or a religiousconversion to a more non-conformist branch of Christianity (typically Quakerism). Blakeexperienced this, albeit to a relatively minor extent; he admits to having misinterpreted socialismbecause he had previously only been exposed to information sources that had an anti-socialistbias. To his surprise, however, he found that socialism <appears to me to be almost the ethics ofChristianity without the Christ,= although the intensity of his religious fervor convinced him thatthis omission meant socialism was an ideology that was inevitably bound to fail in the absence ofhis saviour.131Christian-socialist COs were not a particularly prominent or popular group; as fellow COFrank Goodcliffe later observed in a letter to Pauline Pollard, there was but a very small numberof Christian-socialist COs, and the other Socialist COs tended to regard this fusion of beliefs asan odd combination and an inherent contradiction.132The inconsistencies between socialism and many forms of organized Christianity did notstop Joseph Hoare, who wryly observed in 1974 that he <came out of prison a red-hot socialistand joined the ILP and so forth.=133 Furthermore, there were a number of WW1 pacifists whoclearly ended up holding leftist political tendencies even if they, like Blake, did not view133 Hoare, interview with Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #556, REEL #5.132 Franke Goodcliffe to Pauline Pollard, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.131 Ibid., 64.130 Ibid., 60.55themselves as politically active. One particularly entertaining example is Rachel Cadbury, whoworked with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee (FWVRC) during the war. In 1987,during an interview with Lyn E. Smith of the IWM, she responded to an invitation for herthoughts on the suffragette movement by hurriedly clarifying that she <was never interested inpolitics. Never been and never have been 3 no, not deeply interested.=134 Disregarding entirelythe fact that many might argue that her actions themselves inherently constituted political action,this produces an almost endearing lack of self-awareness on Cadbury9s part when she laterobserves in that very same interview that she feels <fury that people are so greedy. Not thepeople, sorry. Companies are so greedy. They all want something they think somebody else hasgot and they want,=135 a remark so inundated with the underpinnings of anti-capitalist thoughtthat it could be quoted in an introductory-level political science textbook. (And if one did notknow any better, they might suspect Cadbury was engaging in self-parody when she goes on tosay, vis-a-vis the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s, that she does <admire people whowork for it, if they do it for non-political motives. I9m sorry if it gets mixed up with politics 3does it? I9m not interested in politics, no. Well, you can9t be interested in everything, canyou?=)136Taking into consideration the topics discussed above 3 the alternativist/absolutistclassification system, the particulars of religious beliefs among COs, and the politicalunderpinnings of various COs 3 there are a number of conclusions to be drawn regarding theconstruction of CO identity. Firstly, there are a number of insufficiencies and unclear boundarieswithin each of these classification systems, such as those COs who cannot be firmly delineated136 Ibid.135 Ibid., REEL #6.134 Rachel Eveline Cadbury, interview with Lyn E. Smith, recording, October 28, 1987, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #10038, REEL #5, Imperial War Museum, London, England.56as an absolutist or an alternativist, or the fact that COs who objected to the war based on theirinterpretation of Christian doctrine were united across denominational boundaries, even asmembers of their own congregations insisted that the war did not defy Christ9s teachings. Butsecondly, and more importantly, we can conclude that the sense of identity held by COs tended tobe shockingly stable. The way they thought about themselves tended to be formed during the waras a result of their pre-war upbringings, and it rarely changed significantly during the post-waryears. At times they appreciated the diverse perspectives of their peers, and at times they foundthe differences between them to be a source of frustration. But above all else, whether absolutistor alternativist, Quaker or Roman Catholic or Church of England, Socialist radical or otherwise,COs consistently presented their role as conscientious objectors as the most important element oftheir identity and as the fabric that bound them together as a community of like-minded yetfiercely independent individuals. Indeed, the simple fact that these men chose to engage with theprojects and studies conducted by researchers hoping to document their stories decades latershows that their shared tribulations imbued these men with a sense of fellowship that could notbe forgotten. No matter what set them apart from one another, and no matter how much time hadpassed after their stand against the First World War, Britain9s WW1 COs remained proudlyunited by their moral rebellion.57Chapter 5: <Not A Nasty Lot At All:= CO Retrospectives on their Treatment bytheir Fellow Men During the WarIf the relationship that COs had with each other seems paradoxical because theirdifferences served dual purposes as both a foundation for unity and a reminder to rely upon theindividual strength of their convictions, the relationship they had with the rest of British societyseems paradoxical for an entirely different reason. COs, in the years after the war, were presentedby historians (and, to an extent, by themselves) as having been a near-universally despised andpersecuted group of outcasts, shunned by their peers for being cowardly <shirkers= content toallow other men to die in their place. And while it is certainly true that much of British societytreated them this way, especially the conservative media and members of government, much ofthe available evidence produced by COs suggests that it was quite ordinary for them to be treatedwith much more consideration than the conventional narrative purports. Many CO accounts callattention to numerous instances of positive treatment and support offered to them by members ofBritish society, although some groups are mentioned more frequently than others. Although talesof physical abuse and belittlement predominate, many COs still shared stories about findingallies in the unlikeliest of places. A friendly face or an encouraging word could often be foundeven among the ranks of those men who were responsible for their predicament. Who were thesesurprising supporters, and how did Britain9s WW1 COs make sense of the occasional supportoffered to them by men who held social, legal and political power over them?A few 3 albeit a scant few 3 of those allies came from the Christian church. As previouslydiscussed, the majority of Christian COs found that it was only their own personal interpretationof the teachings of Christ that went against the war while church leaders seemed to be all for it,even though waging war at all seemed to be a great sin in the context of the pacifistic reading of58the Bible popular among Christian COs. This trend of pro-war sentiment among Christianauthorities is perhaps best exemplified by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, RandallDavidson. Serving as the Archbishop of Canterbury since 1903, Davidson had been the highestauthority of the Church of England for nearly the entire first quarter of the 20th century. ThoseCOs who foresaw the coming war might have expected Davidson to be a potential ally in theirstand, as Davidson was preaching against the oncoming war just days before it broke out. But byChristmas 1914 he had changed his tune, and his stance was that only an unworthy household,disloyal to Great Britain, kept their men safe at home rather than fighting at the front.137Leaders of smaller, local churches usually followed in Davidson9s example, and theirmilitant stance made an impression upon COs such as Percy Leonard. Decades later in a 1976interview, Leonard, describing the minister of his pre-war congregation, ruefully remarked thatonce the war began, <his favourite phrase was 8our cruel and malicious foes.9 I can rememberthat like it was yesterday.=138 To Leonard, this apparent reversal of values was forever bafflingand something of a personal betrayal. When asked by his interviewer how the minister justifiedhis stance in the context of Christian teachings, Leonard could only say <I just don9t know. I justdon9t know, because… No, prior to the war, I was behind him all the way. Now, I just don9tunderstand it at all.=139 James Ronald Long, a fellow CO who was part of the Methodist church,felt similarly. A strong believer in the missionary tradition of spreading Christianity to others,Long described the sentiments being shared at his church at the time as <something I couldn9tunderstand… I couldn9t see that I could make a man Christian by killing him.=140140 James Ronald Long, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/058, <Long, James Ronald,= Tape#27 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.139 Ibid.138 Percy Albert Leonard, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, July 19th, 1976, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #382, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.137 Will Ellsworth-Jones, We Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of the First World War9s Conscientious Objectors(London: Aurum Press Limited, 2008), 41-42.59Other COs, however, were able to come to terms with the change in policy and eventuallydeveloped their own explanations regarding this dramatic shift in church policy. While Leonardand Long were never able to wrap their heads around the logic of their former spiritual leaders,Harold Bing had developed his own opinion on the matter by the time he wrote to PaulinePollard in 1972. Bing concluded that while Christian COs sought to follow in the example theybelieved Christ had set, church authorities turned to the teachings of other prominent figures inChristian doctrine besides Christ in order to justify the war that the British governmentdemanded. In Bing9s correspondence with Pollard, he speculated that the Roman Catholicchurch, for example, was able to justify the war in accordance with the doctrine of <Just War=promoted by St. Thomas Aquinas.141The ardently pro-war manner in which most church authorities presented the war to theircongregations naturally extended to their interactions with the COs among their audiences. ManyCOs remembered being actively discouraged by their leaders. Roland Reigne, for instance,recalled not only being pressured to enlist by a minister who he knew, but also being ardentlytaunted for his conscientious objection by a coworker who was <very pious and Superintendentof a Sunday School.=142 At his church in the small parish of Kings Walden in Hertfordshire,Bertram Leonard Somner was apparently subjected to <terrible recruiting sermons, preached atme, who was the only eligible person in the congregation!=143Still, a lucky handful of other COs found that their views were shared by theircongregational leaders. Bernard G. Lawson recounted that when faced with the decision to objector enlist, <I was very much helped by the Minister of the Church, Rev. Nicholas Richards,143 Bertram Leonard Somner, <A Conscientious Objector9s Memories of WW1,= 2, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/088,<Somner, Bertram Leonard,= (manuscript), Peter Liddle Collection.142 Roland J. Reigne, <Recollections of Roland J Reigne,= 5, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/078, <Reigne, Roland J.,=(manuscript), Peter Liddle Collection.141 Harold F. Bing to Pauline Pollard, February 19th 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.60himself a keen pacifist.=144 William Marwick, though he was taken aback by the <jingoism= ofmany members of the clergy, still found that his pacifism was encouraged by two influentialclergymen, one of whom led a working-class congregation in Glasgow.145 Charles F. Dingle, inhis letters to Pauline Pollard, credited his Baptist minister, a man named Rev. John Morris, withinfluencing him to become a CO.146Finally, as to be expected in any situation where ideologies clash, there were at least afew members of the clergy who attempted to strike a balance between supporting andcondemning COs. One newspaper clipping of an unfortunately unclear origin, kept in ascrapbook originally compiled by the father of FAU member Harold Gundry Clark, quotes astatement apparently given by the Bishop of Birmingham, Henry Wakefield, on the subject ofCOs. Wakefield was <persuaded that as a general rule conscientious objectors are, most of them,conscientious= but nevertheless felt <that they have mis-read the character of our Lord JesusChrist, and the need for sternness in the healing of the world9s diseases. I think they areabsolutely wrong in refusing to do war service of a healing kind, though I understand theirargument.=147 Wakefield9s presentation of COs as well-meaning yet wayward souls who weremaking the wrong decision based upon a genuine misunderstanding of religious doctrine seemsto have been the middle ground between the stance of clergymen like Davidson and clergymenlike Richards.While it was rare for church officials to actively support COs, when this support didmanifest it typically appeared in an obvious fashion by church leaders who spoke their mind147 Newspaper clipping titled <Not Cowards= in a scrapbook made by the father of Harold Gundry Clark,Liddle/WW1/019, <Clark, Harold Gundry,= Peter Liddle Collection.146 Charles F. Dingle to Pauline Pollard, March 3rd, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.145 William Hutton Marwick, untitled unpublished memoir, 3, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/063, <Marwick, William Hutton,=Peter Liddle Collection.144 Bernard G. Lawson, <Memories of a Quaker International Worker,= 3, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/054, <Lawson,Bernard G.,= (manuscript), Peter Liddle Collection.61openly. Less obvious was the subtle leniency granted by the police officers that were responsiblefor arresting COs who refused to report when conscripted. Although these individuals were thefirst point of contact for the British state9s attempt to exert authority over COs who rejected thedecision of the Tribunals, CO accounts frequently tell stories of police officers who treated theirarrestees with an unexpectedly casual attitude. Frank Shackleton claimed that the police sergeantwho arrested him freely obliged his request that he and the sergeant walk on opposite sides of theroad so that factory workers would not see Shackleton in handcuffs.148 George Frederick Dutchrecounted coming home to find out that the local police had opted to leave a message with hisfamily, asking him to report to them the next day.149 One might suppose that they trusted that aman who was willing to stand up for his beliefs would be honorable enough to turn himself inrather than attempting to flee. Perhaps the most astonishing account among them all is that ofWalter Griffin, who was the recipient of a rather unusual birthday/Christmas gift courtesy of hislocal police. When the detectives came to Griffin on December 23rd, his birthday, they hadapparently <decided, between themselves, that if I promised that I would not leave the placewhere I was, which was the home of a Pentecostal person, as long as I could be there when theywanted me, which would be in two days or three days time, they would come back for me, if Ipromised to do that.=150Why did these officers of the law act in such a lax regard towards men who were, in theopinion of the national government, criminals, even traitors? COs themselves have offered somedegree of speculation on the matter, attributing the mercy offered to them to motivations bothaltruistic and pragmatic. Shackleton9s interpretation falls into the former category; he merely150 Walter Griffin, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive,Catalogue #9790, REEL #2.149 George Frederick Dutch, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, April 25th, 1976, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #356, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.148 Shackleton, <All my Tomorrows,= 93, LIDDLE/WW1/084, <Shackleton, Frank,= Peter Liddle Collection.62characterized his arresting officer as <a very humane man= with <no desire to inflict upon me anygreater indignity than the situation demanded.=151 While this may seem to be a very charitableinterpretation for a man in his situation to hold, it does make sense that Shackelton saw it thatway. Since many COs held pacifist positions in correlation with a belief in the innate value ofhuman life, it seems natural that they would be predisposed towards the opinion that their peerswere innately good-natured. This sort of stance seems to be implied by Shackleton9s usage of theterm <humane,= after all. Naturally, there were other COs who had a less idealistic take on thematter, believing this attitude to be a simple matter of pragmatism on the part of the policeofficers. Griffin posited that one possible reason that his local police gave him an extraChristmas as a free man was simply because it would be too complicated, from a logisticalstandpoint, to hold him in detention over the Christmas holiday.152 Finally, there was also thesimple fact that, in many small English towns, there was a very real possibility that COs wouldbe on good terms with local police officers due to their interpersonal history. This was the casefor CO Eric Dott, who found that his arresting officer <was very shy about it all because we allknew each other well and he said he was very sorry but he had come to arrest me[.]=153 Given thesimplicity of this answer, it would be unsurprising if the presence of a pre-existing relationshipbetween police officials and COs was likely the root cause behind the majority of these kinds ofinteractions.Still, not every CO thought as kindly about the men who arrested them as Shackleton andDott did. This was not without reason, as some COs reported having more hostile interactionswith their arresting officer. CO H. Blake described how the constable who arrested him made abrief attempt to convert Blake to the constable9s pro-war perspective. Blake9s response to the153 Felicity Goodall, A Question of Conscience (United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997), 11.152 Walter Griffin, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #9790, REEL #2.151 Shackleton, <All my Tomorrows,= 93, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/084, <Shackleton, Frank,= Peter Liddle Collection.63officer9s argument was a remark that he scathingly characterized as <an assertion theimplications of which seemed to be too stupendous for the limits of his imagination toencompass.=154Under the circumstances, it was perfectly warranted that COs held these kinds ofnegative opinions about the police, and even Blake9s outright hostility is unsurprising. After all,on top of any mistreatment or derision present in their personal interactions with COs, policeplayed no small part in the harassment of, and attempts to discredit, anti-conscriptionassociations such as the No-Conscription Fellowship.155 Police officers were also the agentsdeployed by the state to track down and arrest those who were actively avoiding conscription by,for example, fleeing to Ireland.156 The relative kindness of a few local officers as they wereshepherding COs into the hands of the military could hardly be measured as equal compensationfor their participation in this sinister government campaign.And yet, any negative remarks COs had to say about police officers were still typicallyfar less bitter than their commentary about tribunal officials. While the antagonism between COsand tribunal administrators is a subject that other scholars have exhaustively documented, it isstill perhaps best to quote the remarks of a few individuals to demonstrate the depth of thishostility. In what reads as an understatement born from a desire to be polite, Howard CruttendenMarten observed that his <local tribunal was pretty hostile. They were… May I say I was not metwith a great depth of vision or understanding.=157 This common attitude among tribunal memberswas openly recognized during the war. Writing in 1916, Henry W. Nevinson, an English warcorrespondent and founding member of the FAU, rather plainly admitted the fact that <Nearly all157 Marten, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #1.156 Ibid., 181-182.155 Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men, 148-150.154 Blake, Whose Image and Superscription?, unpublished manuscript, 54, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/008, <Blake, H.,=Peter Liddle Collection.64[tribunals] agreed in regarding conscience as an unpatriotic offense which must be visited bypenalties.=158 But the overall attitude towards COs by the tribunals was not necessarily the resultof pro-war passion held by the entire membership of the tribunal. Instead, this hostility towardsCOs was often driven by a small subset of tribunal members with strong opinions. In his memoir,Marten suggests that most members of his local tribunal conducted themselves only as passiveparticipants in the affair, and that the chairman of the tribunal was the singular individual amongthem who actually engaged with Marten.159 Joseph Hoare likewise reported that there was at leastone member of his local tribunal wholly disengaged with the bureaucratic process, a man <whothroughout the procedures sat with his head buried in his hands, didn9t say a word.=160Unfortunately, this apathetic air of passivity and disinterest was typically the bestreception that COs could hope for. Local tribunals, which were only intended to determine thesincerity of a CO9s beliefs rather than challenge or assess the core validity of those beliefs, werenevertheless spearheaded by pro-war individuals who sought to actively dismantle the argumentsthat COs made against the war in a display of moral superiority. Military representatives, inparticular, tended to take the task upon themselves to force COs into an ethical debate.According to an account published in the July 28th, 1916 edition of The Friend, the followingexchange occurred during the tribunal of a man named John Sturges Stephen:J.S.S [John Sturges Stephen]: Has not a man a right to hold his views from a profoundreligious conviction?M.R [Military Representative]: No! No man has a right to hold such views when he isliving under the protection of the army and navy and the shelter of the Government whichdoes not share the same belief. Why don9t you go to another island?161161 The Friend, July 28th, 1916, 584, TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius Barritt Papers.160 Hoare, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #556, REEL #2.159 Marten, White Feather, 9, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Marten Cruttenden Papers.158 Henry W. Nevinson, 8The conscientious objector9, Atlantic Monthly, 103:695 (November 1916), 690,https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1916/11/118-5/132300274.pdf.65That same issue of The Friend also recounted the story of another CO, who was told bythe retired clergyman serving on his tribunal as the military representative that <The animal willprotect its young and it has that power given to it by its Creator. Ought we not to do thesame?=162Of course, as a Quaker publication, The Friend would perhaps have been biased towardsreporting instances of verbal abuse of COs during tribunals. There is a possibility this does notconstitute a genuinely representative sample of tribunal stories, and there is certainly someevidence that local tribunals could occasionally be accommodating towards COs. Angus Wallaceargues that the North Riding Appeal Tribunal, for example, allowed <a high number ofexemptions from combat duty and temporary exemptions= that suggested <understanding andacceptance of the COs arguments.=163 On a directly interpersonal level, it should be noted thatmilitary representatives did not always pounce upon the opportunity to belittle and bicker withCOs; Jack Foister reported that at his tribunal, the military representative <did not in any wayabuse his position. He was quite fair.=164 Even David Blelloch, who said that he couldn9t fathomany member of the tribunal at Oxford having sympathetic sentiments towards COs, couldn9trecall having his moral reasoning attacked. He described the military representative, one CaptainBaldry, as a <perfectly nice man= who <naturally did his duty.=165 Furthermore not all tribunalsuniversally refused COs the exemption that they were asking for. Although many local tribunalsinsisted they did not have the authority to grant absolute exemption, other tribunals recognizedthat they indeed had that right, and acted upon it.165 David H. Blelloch, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, December 1978, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/009, <Blelloch, DavidHabersham Hamilton,= Tape #581, (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.164 Jack Foister, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, July 1976, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/031, <Foister, Jack,= Tape #377,(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.163 Wallace, <A Community of Consent,= 111.162 Ibid., 583.66While one might expect that rank-and-file soldiers would have had the strongestmotivation to resent COs, given the fact that the duty that these 8conchies9 were 8shirking9 wasthe one that soldiers had accepted despite the great personal risk, CO accounts suggest that thiswas rarely the case. British soldiers seem to have formed a mutually respectful relationship withCOs much of the time. Many COs remembered receiving encouragement and support fromsoldiers, and the memories of these moments of validation lingered with them for decades.Alfred Evans, for example, recounted with clear appreciation three distinct instances whereinsoldiers went out of their way to offer him material support in the form of sustenance during hisbrief stay at Cinder City Camp, Le Havre. He mentions one incident when a Scottish soldier toldhim <I don9t agree with you, laddie, but I admire your pluck= and offered him some tea. Anothertime an anonymous soldier <sent up his dinner to me with his compliments. I was completelytaken aback, but being a prisoner, could only send him my thanks and appreciation by one of theguard. I never saw him, or even found out who he was. I only hope he fared well and survivedthe war.=166Finally, there is one soldier who made quite an impression upon Evans, on the nightbefore he and the other COs with him departed the camp. In an interview with Peter Liddle,Evans describes an Irish guardsman who assisted the prisoners in throwing themselves a smallparty in the guardroom, going so far as to collect their money in order to go out and buy them<cakes and fruit and chocolate.=167 (On another occasion, Evans also observed that their moneyalone would not have been sufficient payment for what the soldier brought back for them,suggesting that he contributed a sum from his own pocket in order to finance the festivities.)168168 Evans, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #489, REEL #5.167 Alfred William Evans, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, May, 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/030, <Evans, AlfredWilliam,= Tape #27 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.166 Evans, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #489, REEL #5.67Other COs also claimed to have received gifts from soldiers. Roland J. Reigne, in his recollectionof late December 1916, which he and his brother Sidney spent at Horsfield Barracks, explained:For the next seven or eight days we were confined to this barrack room, with these menwho had seen some of the suffering and misery of actual war. Yet they were most kind tous, insisting on sharing some part of their Christmas presents with us. At times we sataround the fire, discussing all manner of subjects, including war and peace, and ourparticular position, in a most friendly way.169In addition to acts of encouragement and material support from low-ranking soldiers,many COs also spoke of soldiers further up the chain of command who treated them well despitethe circumstances. Ronald Long spoke of a commanding officer who was a <perfect gentleman=at Tunstall Camp, who may have been the same (Colonel or Major) Wise that brothers Rolandand Len Payne described as <very kind and very very persuasive. He was more difficult tooppose than the bullies.=170 The ability of this man to make the Payne brothers waver (howeverslightly) in their convictions suggests he made quite an impression on them, which was probablyno easy feat given the resolute, headstrong nature found within most COs. And even COs whocould not be swayed whatsoever had positive memories of some army officers. Alfred Evans toldthe story of a captain in Boulogne who went so far as to salute him when Evans insisted that hewas prepared to die doing what he thought was right.171While this was a demonstration of respect, other officers apparently displayed signs ofsincere emotional distress born of empathy for the situation COs found themselves in. FredMurfin9s memoir, Prisoners for Peace, described how the officer escorting a group of COs on atrain ride repeatedly asked the group to allow him to remove their handcuffs, repeatedly171 Evans, statement from <When the Saints Go Marching In,= 1966, 6, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/030, <Evans, AlfredWilliam= (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.170 James Ronald Long, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, Tape #27 (transcript) Peter Liddle Collection; Len and RolandPayne, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, February 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/070, <Payne, Leonard Joseph,= Tape #70(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection. Long identifies the man as possibly being a <Colonel= Wise, while the Paynebrothers refer to a <Major= Wise.169 Roland J. Reigne, <Recollections of Roland J. Reigne,= 20, Peter Liddle Collection.68badgering them until they relented. Murfin concluded that the officer must have feltuncomfortable about the situation.172 In a 1974 account of his experiences, George F Dutchdescribed an early encounter with an old sergeant by the name of Wood, who attempted toconvince Dutch and his fellow COs to change their minds, and who Dutch believed <wasgenuinely grieved that he could not move us.=173 Howard Marten told a similar tale, down to thespecific usage of the term <genuinely=;There was a little Scottish man there, a regimental sergeant major, and he had tears in hiseyes, almost. He said <You don9t know what you9re up against.= He said <You9ll have anawful time.= Well, I said <I can9t help that, that9s not my affair.= And he really wasgenuinely concerned that the trouble that we were going to meet 3 and we were foreverbeing threatened with the death sentence, over and over again.174And yet, although there were plenty of soldiers that showed them friendly, evencompassionate treatment, COs did not necessarily feel that their position was well understood bythese individuals. Despite his encounter with the tearful Scottish sergeant major, Howard Martencame to believe that the support that COs received from soldiers often stemmed from thesoldiers9 own resentment of the military. Furthermore, he felt that the soldiers failed to grasp thesincere convictions of COs, and <couldn9t get away from their minds that you were out to saveyour skin and not for principle. And when they found it was merely you were fighting aprinciple, they couldn9t understand it. It was outside their ken.=175 Marten9s observation on thismatter seems to be well-founded, as there were soldiers who readily acknowledged the reality ofa psychological gap between the two groups. For example, in an article titled <The Soldier andthe C.O.,= published as part of the No-Conscription Fellowship9s 1920 post-war souvenirpamphlet, Captain E. McGill freely confessed that <it is possible to recognise the nobility of the175 Ibid.174 Marten, interview with Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #3.173 Untitled account by George F Dutch, March 1974, 6, Imperial War Museum Private Papers, Document Item#7651, <Private Papers of G F Dutch,= Imperial War Museum, London, England.172 Fred Murfin, Prisoners for Peace, unpublished manuscript, 1965, 55, TEMP MSS 722, Library of the Society ofFriends, Friends House, London, England (hereafter cited as TEMP MSS 722, Prisoners for Peace.)69sacrifice made by a conscientious objector for his cause, without being able to identify oneselfwith him in an absolute sense.=176While Marten may have felt that way when looking back on his experiences, there is alsoevidence that at least some percentage of soldiers actually went above and beyond what anyonewould reasonably expect of them in order to support COs. Captain McGill9s contribution to theNCF9s pamphlet, published just a year after the war, represents one such instance. But othersoldiers chose to defend COs in a highly public way even during the early days of conscription,by writing letters to newspapers professing their sympathy. One such letter appeared in the May4th, 1916 edition of the liberal newspaper, The Nation. Written by a soldier named W. E.Armstrong, who requested that his letter be published in order to help combat <the widespreadbelief that those fighting have no respect for the Conscientious Objector.=177 Armstrong went sofar as to jab at the biased nature of the tribunals, pointing out that these councils, composed ofmen too old to be conscripted themselves, had largely assumed that COs were insincere in theirbeliefs as a general rule rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. Another man by thename of Miles Malleson, writing to The Daily News that same year, claimed to have been asoldier who was wounded, released from armed service, and then became a CO (presumably inan ideological sense rather than a technical one, since he had already been let go from thearmy.)178 While the legitimacy of these letters is now impossible to verify, the fact that both menwillingly supplied their names supports the notion that they were penned by genuine soldiers. Ofcourse, there are also examples of letters published in newspapers that were reported to be from178 Miles Malleson, letter to the editor, Daily News, 1916, TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius Barritt Papers.177 W. E. Armstrong, letter to the editor, Nation, May 4th, 1916, TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius Barritt Papers.176 Captain E. McGill, <The Soldier and the CO,= The No Conscription Fellowship: A Souvenir of its work duringthe years 1914-1919, (The Fellowship, 1920), 32, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/038, <Gaudie, Norman.,= Peter LiddleCollection.70soldiers holding an anti-CO stance,179 and there is insufficient data available to calculate whichstrain of commentary was more commonly found in soldiers9 letters to the British press.There are also some accounts from COs that do not colour soldiers in such a uniformlypositive light. There were unsurprisingly interactions of a mixed nature, where soldiers came intoconflict with one another due to holding opposing opinions on the COs9 situation. One ofPollard9s respondents, Richard West, recalled a time when he was staying in the same room as agroup of soldiers while in military custody. One night, one of the soldiers attempted to encouragethe others to <do him in,= but another soldier came to West9s defence and sat at his bedside forthe entire night.180 At other times, soldiers displayed no such sympathy, instead delivering to COsthe sort of rough treatment one would have expected they would demonstrate towards the<shirkers.= H Blake described an encounter with several soldiers who were attempting to coercehim into wearing an army uniform:they knew 3 as also I knew, 3 that such refusal would ensure to me a considerable amountof rough usage, & it was a striking demonstration of the brutality of the common soldier9smind that they received my answer with marked evidence of pleasurable anticipation inthe infliction of suffering upon a fellow human being. With a great outburst of laughter,they told me I was 8in for a rough ride,9181Of course, his reference to the <brutality of the common soldier9s mind= seems to indicatethat Blake had low expectations of the rank-and-file soldier9s emotional intelligence. Whileperhaps this could be dismissed as a manifestation of the (arguably warranted) 8holier-than-thou9attitude that tints a fair number of Blake9s recollections, even COs who generally seemed to likemost of the soldiers they met still provided accounts of soldiers exhibiting crude behaviortowards them. Alfred Evans, who, as a reminder, provided several tales of positive treatment atCinder City Camp, also remembered being heckled by several passing soldiers after his181 Blake, Whose Image and Superscription?, 70, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/008, <Blake, H.,= Peter Liddle Collection.180 Richard West to Pauline Pollard, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.179 For example, <An Officer on Opinion in the Trenches,= Liverpool Echo, April 22nd, 1916.71commuted death sentence was passed. He remarked in 1966 that <they called out 8Serves youright! You should have been obedient to those in authority over you.9 St. Paul, of course! He hadthe merits of a soldier and more of his limitations.=182 This comparison to St. Paul is particularlyscathing coming from Evans, who made his severe distaste for the biblical figure crystal clear inhis interview with the IWM eight years later when he took the opportunity to deliver a lengthyrant about the saint:Work out your own salvation. St Paul is a fool, he made more trouble ever owed forChristianity than anyone [else] ever associated with it. I have a book at home with 16quotations from Jesus and 16 from St. Paul and they sit side by side and St. Paul deniesJesus in every one not merely in words but in sense... rubbish. Work out your ownsalvation! I9m sorry, lady, I9m addressing you as a public meeting.183(The words in italics were spoken by Evans over what sounds to have been the noise ofhim slamming his fist(s) against a tabletop, presumably with the aim of emphasizing hisdisrespect for St. Paul.)With Evans9 passionate testimony taken into consideration, we can conclude that even ifsoldiers displayed sympathetic and empathetic behaviors towards COs with a frequency that hasthus far been under acknowledged by historians, the conventional narrative of widespreadmistreatment still holds some merit. Furthermore, while the aforementioned examples of abusedirected towards COs by soldiers was verbal abuse, it should be acknowledged that physicalmistreatment, sometimes even outright violence, was not uncommon either. This frequently camein the form of the formal infliction of corporal punishment on disobedient <soldiers= by theirso-called superior officers. For instance, although he was lucky enough not to face the barbaricordeal personally, Bert Brocklesby was well aware of what is arguably the most notorious ofthese punishments, <field-punishment number one which consists in tying a man with arms183 Evans, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #489, REEL #8.182 Evans, transcript of statement from <When the Saints Go Marching In,= 1966, 7, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/030,<Evans, Alfred William,= Peter Liddle Collection.72extended to a barbed wire fence for at least an hour at a time.=184 But mundane physical abuseoutside the auspices of mandated corporal punishment was also commonplace; soldiers oftenbecame physically aggressive with the COs under their supervision, even when the COs werebeing reasonably obedient. Most COs eventually came to view this aggression as stemming notfrom genuine malice on the part of ordinary soldiers, but rather a result of their predictabletendency towards compliance with those higher up the chain of command. Howard Marten, forinstance, had this to say on the matter:When we were leaving the Mill Hill Barracks, we were rough-handled [by soldiers],having our heels kicked and pushed around, and going down from the barracks to therailway station, and it was obviously laid-on at the instructions of the authorities. And itsoon stopped. I found that over and over again, it was a certain exhibitionism ofrough-play which was not-so-much genuine as put-on for the benefit of the authorities.185Marten was not the only CO to suggest that the severity of their manhandlingcorresponded to the attitude of the commanding officers in charge of their handlers. Fred Murfin,in his memoir, remarked that the presence of a good-natured officer typically resulted in kinderbehaviour from the soldiers under his supervision. In his words, <We found, as a rule, that if theofficer was decent, the men were.=186Why is it that COs were so keen to provide explanations for the cruelty of soldiers, and soeager to highlight the deeds and words of soldiers who showed them some slight kindness? Onemust naturally question whether the relatively soft-hearted sentiment displayed by some COstowards the soldiers who were complicit in their torment is anachronistic and out-of-alignmentwith their actual feelings at the time of the war. Perhaps the passage of time dulled feelings ofresentment, or maybe a desire to put the past behind them as they grew older caused COs to186 Fred Murfin, Prisoners for Peace, unpublished manuscript, 3, TEMP MSS 722, Prisoners for Peace.185 Marten, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #3.184 John Hubert Brocklesby, Escape from Paganism, unpublished manuscript, 21, TEMP MSS 412, John BrocklesbyPapers.73selectively curate their stories in later accounts, choosing their words with the aim of avoidingthe revival of old social tensions. After all, many of the above-quoted interviews wereundertaken in the latter half of the 20th century, when many were hoping that the world could putthe horrors of the First and Second World Wars behind them. Dutch, Evans and Martenconducted their interviews with the IWM in the mid-1970s, not long after Littlewood9s <Oh!What a Lovely War” was performed on stage and in the midst of Cold-War era political unrest. Itmay be that COs testifying at this uneasy time felt the need to humanize participants in the FirstWorld War, perhaps imagining that as the heroic holdouts who stood against that terribleworld-shaking conflict, COs had an obligation to provide hope and reassure others that peoplewere fundamentally good and war was not inevitable. It would not be unusual for interviewees totry to deliver the narrative they believe to be anticipated by their audiences; as noted by LynnAbrams <Discomposure arises when we are unable to align personal memories with publiclyacceptable versions of the past. We all seek to achieve composure.=187Alternatively, perhaps instances of kindness from soldiers stood out more in theirmemories simply because they were a novelty, while the various abuses COs were subjected toblurred together as an unpleasant, hazy mass of experiences.188 And certainly, there can be nodoubt that the specific prompts COs were given by their audience while delivering their accountsimpacted what they chose to talk about; Marten9s story about the 8exhibitionism of rough play9by soldiers at Mill Hill was in direct response to Margaret A. Brooks, his interviewer, asking thequestion <did you find that when men were hostile it was in public in front of a group?=189 Didthis phrasing perhaps trigger some sense of masculine solidarity for Marten, nudging him189 Marten, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #383, REEL #3.188 There is also the possibility that either the archival institutions who kept these primary sources, or the author ofthis thesis, is responsible for any bias towards these narratives for similar reasons.187 Abrams, <Memory as both source and subject,= Writing the History of Memory, 99.74towards taking a sort of excusatory, <boys-will-be-boys= attitude on the situation, explaining hisdescription of the situation as a form of rough-play?As shown in the testimonies compiled in this chapter, COs had a complex relationshipwith the various authority figures with which the war brought them into contact. Clergymen,police officers, politicians, tribunal members and soldiers were often cruel and judgementaltowards the <conchies,= but there were also many displays of kindness towards COs carried outby members of those same groups. COs were consequently forced to try and make sense of thiscontradiction in whatever ways they could. Sometimes this led COs to conclude that theiropponents on the other side of the great struggle against war were acting thoughtlessly. At othertimes they concluded that the rest of Britain9s men were simply doing what they thought wastheir duty, just the same as the COs themselves. Crucial to each of these interactions, however, isthe fact that the participants, including both the COs and the other side, were almost exclusivelymen. As such, hanging like a shadow over all of these interactions is the spectre of early-20thcentury masculinity and the notion that a man is obligated to follow whatever authority he viewsas supreme, whether that be the British government, Christian doctrine, or one9s own moralcompass.75Chapter 6: White Feathers and Black Sheep: COs, Gender Dynamics and FamilialAlienationThe question of gender dynamics is essential to understanding the lives and legacies ofCOs. The relationship COs had with their fellow men and their sense of masculinity isundeniably relevant to their experiences in the 1910s, after all, as the patriarchal social structureand gender norms at play in Great Britain at the time meant that both COs and those whom theyengaged in their power struggle against 3 namely, the military and civil authorities 3 wereexclusively male. Considerable efforts have already been undertaken by historians to unpack thiscomplex subject. As previously discussed, Lois Bibbings has done excellent work analyzing theways in which the masculinity of COs came under attack during the war at the hands of Britishsociety. Drawing upon the portrayal of COs in political cartoons and tribunal transcripts,Bibbings established that <the unconscientious conscientious objector came to represent not onlyan unpopular identity but also an extremely unmanly one.=190 How exactly did this come to pass?How did COs reckon with this emasculation, and how did it influence their relationship withthose in their domestic sphere?Political pundits and tribunal members were not necessarily the only culprits behind thetheft of CO masculinity. Even their female associates in the anti-war movement posed a potentialthreat towards the claim COs held on masculinity. Following in Bibbing9s footsteps, KabiHartman9s <Male Pacifists in British Women9s World War I Novels: Toward an 8EnlightenedCivilisation9= has demonstrated that the female allies of COs, in their own unique way, were alsoprone to stripping male COs of any claim to traditional masculinity, unintentional though thismay have been. As Hartman argues, women writing about COs during the war, like TheodoraWilson Wilson or Eva Gore-Booth, often created protagonists that fit the following mold:190 Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men, 103.76<Self-sacrificing and spiritually enlightened, these male pacifists are not only Christlike, but arealso often represented as asexual or homosexual4types of the 8intermediate9 or 8third sex.9=191 Inthe heteronormative landscape of early 20th-century England, this kind of characterization wouldhave been in direct conflict with traditional notions and expressions of masculinity. (Of course, itis also important to note that men also occasionally wrote characters who followed this template.Bibbings has pointed out at least one male author, the Scottish novelist & politician JohnBuchan, who also created a heroic but queer-coded CO, the character of Lancelot Wake, in his1919 novel Mr Standfast.)192But while Hartman uses these works primarily as a means to explore the mindset of thewomen writing these texts, we should also ask how the men whose struggle was used as thevehicle for the woman9s voice would have felt about these portrayals. Though undoubtedlywell-intentioned and sympathetic to their plight, these stories in some regards played into thebelief that COs were <an aberration who was not only unmanly and possibly an invert, but wasalso less than a woman; a subhuman breed.=193 Simultaneously, there are elements within thischaracter archetype which are unlikely to have been objectionable from the perspective of thetypical CO. For example, there is little reason to believe that Christian COs would have anyobjections to the character archetypes9 association with Christ, especially given the emphasis thatmany of them placed upon their decision to follow their personal interpretation of his teachingsabove all else. Christ-like saintliness was only one small part of this character archetype. Facedwith <pacifist women writers9 portrayals of conscientious objector characters as asexual,homosexual, or woman-identified,=194 how might COs have felt about their literary counterparts?194 Hartman, <Male Pacifists,= 519.193 Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men, 116.192 Bibbings, Images of Manliness, 352.191 Kabi Hartman, <Male Pacifists in British Women9s World War I Novels: Toward an 8Enlightened Civilisation9,=English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 58, no. 4. (2015): 536.77Unfortunately, this hypothetical is one I cannot conclusively answer. Among thematerials collated during the research process for this thesis, there is no evidence that COs wereparticularly aware of how they were being portrayed in women9s fiction during the war. The COswho were imprisoned, as Harold Bing recounted in one interview, had their access to literaturerestricted by the prison system. While they were eventually allowed to receive books sent tothem by friends on the outside for 8study9 purposes, his testimony seems to suggest that this waslimited to academic texts.195 Bing, Wilfred Littleboy and Phillip Radley all mentioned that theyread a fair number of books about history, although Radley also professed that he indulged inpoetry.196 Eric Southall9s correspondence with his mother from during the war, whichexhaustively chronicles his reading habits, suggests he consumed a similar library of content.197The record suggests, then, that imprisoned COs consumed little-to-no fiction during their stay injail. Even if these COs somehow had the opportunity to read the stories that women were writingabout them, it is rather doubtful that they, in the midst of their struggle, took the time to jot downtheir thoughts on the matter. Of course, COs who were not imprisoned due to being grantedexemption, whether absolute or conditional, did not suffer from these same access restrictions inregards to their reading material.However, there is reason to believe that a number of COs would have eventually becomeaware of these depictions after the war, even if they had not encountered them during the waritself. As previously mentioned, one of the earliest academic works written about CO9s was JohnGraham9s Conscience and Conscription: A History, 1916-1919, published shortly after the war in1921. Graham9s book included as an addendum, in full, Gore-Booth9s short story <The Tribunal,=197 Eric Pritchard Southall to his mother, August 1916-March 1919, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/090, <Southall, EricPritchard,= Peter Liddle Collection.196 Ibid., REEL #6; Littleboy, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #485 REEL #3; Phillip Radley,interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #642, REEL #5.195 Harold Frederick Bing, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, May 6th, 1974, Imperial War MuseumsSound Archive, Catalogue #358, REEL #5 & #6, Imperial War Museum, London, England.78a story that depicts the tribunal of a figure heavily implied to be Christ himself.198 As Grahamspecifies in his author9s note, several COs including Fenner Brockway, Hubert Peet and HowardCruttenden Marten read all or part of this book during the writing process.199 Furthermore, thetext had a lasting popularity with COs. Harold Bing was also familiar with Graham9s text, andrecommended it to Pauline Pollard fifty years later in 1972, as did fellow CO Bernard G.Lawson, who described it as an <excellent and reliable history of the C.O. movement.=200Unfortunately, while this suggests that these COs eventually encountered Gore-Booth9s depictionof their peers, the author could find no direct commentary from any of them regarding theiropinion about this depiction.201Still, these depictions serve to highlight the larger-scale assault on CO masculinity withinsociety as a whole during this time, an assault that COs were starkly aware of. After all, not onlywere COs frequently mocked, belittled and questioned during their tribunals, but the exchangesfrom these meetings were often printed in newspapers for the public to read. This practice waslittle more than a thinly-veiled form of public shaming 3 consider, for example, an extract fromthe March 10th, 1916 issue of The Observer, which was titled <NO MATTER IF THEGERMANS COME.= This extract discusses the tribunal of Harold Pearce, and includes remarksfrom a tribunal member named Mr. Strickland who badgers Pearce with questions such as <Youdon9t care what happens as long as you do nothing?= and <You prefer other people to do the jobfor you rather than do it yourself?=202 The very next segment from that same issue reports that the202 <NO MATTER IF THE GERMANS COME,= Observer, March 10th, 1916, TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius BarrittPapers.201 While one may question the value of raising a question I cannot answer with the evidence I have at hand withinthis thesis, I felt it warranted inclusion in the hopes that another scholar may be able to conduct a deeper, moreconclusive investigation into the matter of WW1 COs and their depiction in women9s literature at a later date.200 Harold F. Bing to Pauline Pollard, February 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence; Bernard G.Lawson to Pauline Pollard, February 28th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.199 Ibid., 11.198 John Graham, Conscience and Conscription: A History, 1916-1919, (England: G. Allen & Unwin LTD., 1922)102-109.79chairman of the tribunal for W. E. Parsons told him <I see. You don9t mind being conquered. Youare prepared to stand by and look on and you think all will be well if all do the same.=203How did these allegations of unmasculine cowardice impact COs? It is possible tooutline the general shape of an answer to this question by comparing the portrayal of the maleCO in women9s literature and newspapers to the construction of masculinity embedded withinthe sources produced by the men themselves. And while these may not be representative of theattitude that every man had towards the question of masculinity, they certainly indicate that asignificant number of COs placed high value on the sense of traditional masculinity as it hadbeen conceived of in English society since the Victorian era 3 a quasi-chivalric masculinitywhich placed emphasis on <loyalty, courtesy, bravery and self-sacrifice.=204 We can see the desireamong COs to claim these qualities in the lines of prose left by one CO to another. One entry inan autograph book presented to J. Nicholl Carter by those imprisoned alongside him at KimmelPark Camp read:Dare to be right! O, dare to be true!Other men9s failures can never save you;Stand by your conscience, your honour, your faith,Stand like a hero and battle til death.205Although the words are used here by a CO, one can readily imagine such dramatic lines,asserting heroic daring and a willingness to be martyred for a cause, being invoked by a soldierfacing mortal peril in the trenches 3 which is precisely the type of man who, in the eyes ofBritish society during the war, had met the criteria necessary to achieve the status of ideal205 Entry in the autograph book of J. Nicholl Carter, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/015, <Carter, J. Nicholl,= Peter LiddleCollection. This quotation originates from the hymnal <Dare to do right, dare to be true= by George Lansing Taylor,1864.204 Anthony Fletcher, <Patriotism, the Great War, and the decline of Victorian Manliness,= History (London) 99, no.334 (2014): 45. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12044.203 <CONSCRIPTION AND BEASTS OF PREY,= Observer, March 10th, 1916, TEMP MSS 62, Cornelius BarrittPapers.80masculinity. As scholar Anthony Fletcher has discussed, this was an intentional stride towardsidealised masculinity on the part of soldiers, embodied by men like 17-year-old CharlesCarrington, who experienced a <craving to demonstrate his manliness= when the war brokeout.206 Carrington9s arguably naive desire to perform an idealized masculinity is unsurprising,given his youth. After all, as Ilana Bet-El observes, the children9s adventure stories that wouldhave been popular during his prepubescent years were informed by chivalric, knightly notions ofmasculinity, and <the large audience of boys who read them were constantly made aware of [theprotagonist9s] manliness, and urged to emulate it.=207COs were raised in the same society as these soldiers and subjected to the same genderedexpectations, which undoubtedly helped shape their decisions. Frederick Gillman, a member ofthe FAU, claimed in an interview in 1977 that his decision to join the organisation stemmed froma sense that <like all young men or most young men in those days you wanted to be doingsomething active.=208 Perhaps Gillman9s desire to lead an <active= life stemmed from exposure tothe popular Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Lord Baden-Powell, another text that Bet-Elargues primed the young men of Britain to strive towards masculine ideals drawn from chivalricaspirations.209 Another FAU member, Alistair MacDonald, admitted that joining the groupinstead of going through tribunals was a compromise of his principles, but also claimed that <Itwas a rather natural procedure. I was a young man. I was anxious to do something.=210 Theinvocation of their manhood to explain their actions shows that, in spite of their willingness to210 Alistair MacDonald, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, September 1977, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/062, <MacDonald,Alistair,= Tape #486 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.209 Bet-El, Conscripts, 186-87.208 Frederick Charles Gillman, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, October 1977, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/039, <Gillman,Charles Frederick,= Tape #488 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.207 Bet-El, Conscripts, 186.206 Fletcher, <the Decline of Victorian Manliness,= 42.81set themselves apart by maintaining their pacifistic principles, these men felt compelled touphold their masculinity.Thus, while one might be tempted dismiss the words in Nicholl9s autograph book assimply an attempt by a CO to reaffirm his dedication to the anti-war cause by scrawling downsome bold words rather than being an effort to reclaim a stolen sense of masculinity, there is noreason to believe that these two acts would have been mutually exclusive. As Bibbings argues,when COs chose to represent themselves as men who were willing to die for their beliefs, thoserepresentations are in fact <the efforts of dissenters from orthodoxy to defend and propound theirstance, often by consciously producing their own propaganda, and the attempts of men toproclaim and/or reclaim their sense of manliness both in their own eyes and in the eyes ofothers.=211 In this way, the COs that chose to frame themselves as heroic stalwarts were arguablyentering into a contest with soldiers over the claim to Victorian masculinity by refusing to follow<other man9s failures= and compromise their moral virtue. If nothing else, they were at leaststaking their right to an equal share of masculinity as the soldiers on the front lines. Still, perhapsit was a sense of masculine solidarity rather than competition that drove CO Alfred Evans to tellan army captain that <men are dying in agony in the trenches for what they believe in. I wouldn9tbe less than that.=212Briefly, we should acknowledge the likelihood that there was some unknowablepercentage of COs who fell outside the normative models of gender identity and expressioncontemporary to Great Britain in the 1910s. While the application of contemporary terminologyused in the discussion of gender and sexuality is a hotly debated practice among historians due to212 Alfred William Evans, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, May, 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/030, <Evans, AlfredWilliam,= Tape #27 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.211 Bibbings, Images of Manliness, 350-351.82the inherent anachronism embedded in such a practice, to imagine that the ~20,000 British COsfrom the First World War would all be, in present-day terminology, cisgender, heterosexualmales would require rejecting statistical probability. Direct evidence of sexual or gendernon-conformity among COs that does not require reading into text may be scarce, but an absenceof evidence does not in and of itself imply absence. There are a number of reasons that wouldexplain why such materials are seemingly non-existent. This includes the highly personal natureof such matters, which decreases the willingness of individuals to commit them to record, evenin modern society. The enforced isolation and high level of observation that most COs weresubjected to throughout the war would have further disincentivized the expression ofnon-conforming gender and sexuality performance. Finally, it should be recognized that thearchive here is bound to be biased towards traditional COs whose post-war lives mapped ontothe 8traditional9 family structure, given the role that both Christian religious institutions (such asthe Library of the Society of Friends) and the families of COs played in safeguarding the archivalmaterials generated by COs. A man cannot pass down old diaries and letters to children he doesnot have or a church that rejects him, after all. Still, this subset of COs would have presumablycomposed only a miniscule percentage of the demographic at most, and it seems likely that mostCOs would have felt some sort of pressure to be <manly.=Then again, COs were often known for being relatively unconcerned with what otherBritons thought. Another entry in the same autograph book mentioned above touches upon thesame sense of stoic resolution as the previous quote, while simultaneously putting on display thestreak of rebellious individualism that COs were prone to incorporating as a part of theirself-image:It matters not how strait the gateNor how charged with punishment the scroll83I am the Master of my FateI am the Captain of my Soul.213This verse 3 or more specifically, the sense of self-assurance and certainty it carriesthrough its rejection of externally-inflicted judgment 3 suggests another pathway to masculinityavailable to COs. Rather than attempt to re-establish their claim on traditionally masculineideals, they could instead reconfigure the 8un-masculine9 elements pushed upon them in order tocreate a representation of masculinity on their own terms. Consider, for example, theoft-discussed trend of young women presenting 8white feathers9 to men in public, a gestureperformed with the intent of shaming these young men for their failure to enlist in the army. Thisrarely, if ever, worked as intended. There were some COs who chose to respond to thesepsychological and physical assaults upon their masculine pride by simply ignoring these womenas best they could. H. England claimed that he was offered white feathers <many a time inLeeds,= but that he <used to ignore them and walk away. I didn9t bother with them, you see.=214But other COs, rather than ignoring these women, chose instead to co-opt the whitefeather and transform the symbol into something with a rather different meaning, instead ofallowing it to serve as a rebuke as the women intended. Consider, Howard Cruttenden Marten,who went so far as to title his memoir <White Feather.= Rather than connecting the feather in histitle with those handed out by scornful young women, Marten prefaced his text with a shortdescription of an interaction between Quakers and Native Americans. According to Marten,Tradition tells of an incident in the time of the Pioneer Settlers in America when acompany of Quakers, unarmed, awaited the coming of the Indians, whose chief,impressed by this gesture of friendliness, took a white feather, their emblem of courage,which he fixed over the doorway of the house as 8The Indians9 Sign of Peace.9215215 Marten, White Feather, 70, TEMP MSS 67, Howard Cruttenden Marten Papers.214 H. England, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, February 1975, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/029, <England, Ernest,= Tape#282 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.213 Ibid. This quotation originates from the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley, 1875.84This supposed encounter provided Marten with a convenient method of reframing thewhite feather as a symbol. Fellow CO Ronald Long did not have an alternative point of referenceto assign the icon, but he did neatly explain the mindset behind his own decision to reclaim thesymbol of the white feather in an interview with Dr. Peter Liddle. Long told the story of beingpresented with a white feather by an American woman who came to replace him at his job at arailway. Per his description, <She just stuck it on I suppose thinking she had done her duty but Iwore it because it was a peace badge and I had no sense of shame in wearing something whichwas, whatever she thought it meant, I thought it meant something quite different which wastrue.=216 In this way, Long transformed the derogatory practice into a symbol of pacifistic prideand virtue. Given the context, it seems obvious that Marten was operating under a similar logicwhen he named his memoir, even if Marten9s usage of <White Feather= is presented on thesurface as being a gesture towards the early relationship between American Quakers andIndigenous Americans and the text does not directly address the usage of the white feather as amarker of cowardice by young women during the Great War.Despite efforts by COs to transform the meaning of this symbol, the intent behind thegiving out of white feathers is indicative of the very real hostility they faced from their civilianpeers. While it is true that the CO testimony quoted throughout this chapter indicates they didfind friendly faces in many circles, the popular narrative of ostracization circulated by historiansexists for a good reason. Many British citizens, when interviewed after the war and asked aboutCOs, described widespread hostility towards COs. Ted Harrison, who was eleven years old whenthe war started, captured the prevailing attitude towards COs at the time in the followingremarks: <Oh, they were conchies. Awful as the Germans. I don9t know how they found out,216 James Ronald Long, interview with Dr. Peter Liddle, 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/058, <Long, J. R.,= Tape #27(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.85but… it was all the girls who9d treat them rough you know. And the boys were ostracized if theywent to school and never had a brother in the army.=217 Harrison also reported witnessingphysical violence directed towards pacifists, recalling an incident where COs getting into anautomobile after departing from a meeting in a church found their car being overturned bydisgruntled members of an assembled crowd.218 Another man who was a child at the time of thewar, Bob Rogers, remembered hearing about a group of COs whose lodgings were destroyedafter an angry mob set fire to the building in an act of patriotism-fueled arson.219 Furthermore, inaddition to the assertions made in accounts provided by non-COs, some CO testimony alsoacknowledged the palpable air of disdain radiating from their fellow Britons. Joseph Hoareclaimed, when asked if there was malice towards COs among the general public, that:Oh, yes, if you didn9t know. If you didn9t know about 3 there were an immense lot. Idon9t think that I caught direct 3 I remember two or three other COs at Princetown goingup to a church for communal service and being stoned away. Sounds almost incredible,doesn9t it? The parson standing on a tombstone, I don9t say actively cheering them on,but at any rate encouraging them. Now I remember myself going through the Cathedral atWakefield, similarly, as I was quite active Church of England in those days, untilWakefield, until Dartmoor at any rate… People drew away. And of course, also some ofthem 3 yes, you were liable to hear all kinds of remarks.220In addition to the contempt of strangers, there were a number of COs who also had tocontend with the negative reaction of their kinfolk, a harsh reality that may have beenparticularly difficult for them to come to terms with. Interviewed alongside her CO husbandCharles William Hope Gill, Mary Gill claimed that her <husband has rather underemphasized theamount of social ostracism he encounters, which he9s forgotten by now, even by his own family.220 Hoare, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #556, REEL #5.219 Bob Rogers, interview by Jon Newman, recording, August 1st 1984, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive,Catalogue # 9560, REEL #2, Imperial War Museum, London, England.218 Ibid.217 Ted Harrison, interview by Jon Newman, recording, 1985, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Catalogue#9555, REEL #92, Imperial War Museum, London, England.86Wouldn9t you agree, darling? That you were rather the black sheep of the family?=221 In response,he admitted that his decision resulted in the loss of communication between himself and hiscousins, and a strained relationship with his sisters.222 And while Hoare was fortunate to receivethe emotional support of his sisters, he had a similarly distant relationship with his own cousins,although Hoare seemed to believe that this may have been the case even in the absence of thewar.223 CO Charles F. Dingle was subjected to an even harsher rejection than Gill or Hoare; in hisletter to Pauline Pollard, he noted that his father, a naval engineer, kicked Dingle out when hetold his father he was a pacifist.224 Harold Bing was fortunate enough to not personally sufferrejection from his immediate family. According to his sister, Dorothy Bing, when their fatherheard about his decision he was <pleased, though he had never preached pacifism to us.=225 Still,Bing apparently had a close friend whose marriage broke down as a result of a disagreement overconscientious objection between the two halves of the couple.226 These men are merely a handfulof the many COs rejected by their family for their ethical position, and similar examples havebeen documented and discussed by historians such as Bibbings.227The psychological impact of being disowned by their families unsurprisingly varied fromCO to CO. While Hoare does not seem to have been phased by the rejection of his cousins, Gilladmitted that being made to feel like a black sheep by his family made him <very sad= and hiswife Mary claimed that the <mental damage is quite considerable when one is unpopular in one9sown family.=228 Similarly, while he did not directly express his feelings on the matter, in the228 Gill and Gill, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #487, REEL #5.227 Bibbings, Telling Tales About Men, 66-68.226 Bing, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #358, REEL #8.225 Moorehead, Troublesome People, 30.224 Charles F. Dingle to Pauline Pollard, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.223 Hoare, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #556, REEL #5.222 Ibid.221 Charles Hope Gill and Mary Gill, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, May 16th 1974, Imperial WarMuseum Sound Archive, Catalogue #487, REEL #6, Imperial War Museum, London, England.87audio recording of his 1974 interview with the IWM, Frank Merrick sounded as though the factthat his father <deplored= his decision to become a CO still bothered him decades later.229 Inother cases, the degree to which this familial conflict impacted the CO in question isdisappointingly unclear. Charles Dingle, whose father disowned him when he joined the FAU,merely remarked during his interview with Dr. Peter Liddle that his father <was very indignantwith me for being a conscientious objector and as a matter of fact he turned me out of home tostart with. He came round a bit later on when he found what work I was doing but he turned meout.=230 On one hand, the fact that Dingle reiterated his father9s decision to 8turn him out9 twicein such a short response coupled with the specific acknowledgement that his father only <cameround a bit= implies that it was his father9s initial reaction, rather than the later reversal, thatstuck with him throughout the years. On the other hand, the overall lack of detail in Dingle9sdescription of his father9s reaction could be taken as indication that this was merely a minorpoint of conflict in an otherwise smooth familial relationship, especially given that five yearsprior to his interview with Dr. Liddle, Dingle informed Pauline Pollard that he <was reconciledwith my father after the war, and feel he was impressed with my war time activities.=231Ultimately, the landscape of gender politics contemporary to WW1-era Britain played akey role in the socio-political struggles of COs. Although their detractors made considerableeffort to demean and belittle these men by calling their masculinity into question and framingthem as deviants or cowards when compared to soldiers, the COs, in their typical stubbornfashion, refused to surrender their cultivated sense of masculinity. Rather than allowing theiropponents to define them, they reclaimed and reshaped the idealized masculine forms inherited231 Charles F. Dingle to Pauline Pollard, March 12th, 1972, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.230 Charles F. Dingle, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, September 1977, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/021, <Dingle, CharlesF.,=Tape #478 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.229 Frank Merrick, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #381, REEL #1.88from Victorian England in order to cast their choices in a positive light. While this allowed themto fend off the assault on their masculinity made by politicians, journalists and strangers on thestreet it was not quite enough to quell, resolve, or allow them to entirely shrug off conflict withintheir families. The scorn of strangers was something most COs were able to dismiss easilyenough, but for a number of pacifists, the broken bonds with their immediate loved ones werenever fully mended. For COs like Gill, Dingle and Merrick, the wounds dealt to their closestinterpersonal relationships by the First World War would remain as life-long scars.89Chapter 7: CO Experiences of and Perspectives on 1918-1945When the Great War finally ended on a fateful November day in 1918, it was as much ofa joyous occasion for COs as it was for the rest of their fellow Britons. The cheerful energy ofthe day is neatly captured by the opening remarks of CO Eric Beavon9s diary entry for that day,which reads:<Peace at length!= Such a scene at the factory as I shall long remember. At eleveno9clock, when the guns were fired and bells blown, all ceased work. The girls rushedhither & thither with flushed, animated faces and laughter and excitement verging onhysterics. They stuck red, white & blue ribbons in their blouses and tied the same aroundtheir hair. Flags were stuck all over the factory… Later in the day, looking up and downthe street, scarcely a man or woman was visible who was not totally drunk.232But while Beavon optimistically highlighted the expected significance that day wouldhold within his memory, the euphoric atmosphere of November 11th, 1918 was merely a singlebright spot at the end of an otherwise dark shroud. The considerable impact made by the war as awhole on European society cannot be overstated, and it would forever leave a mark on all thosewho had borne witness to the horrific conflict. This included the COs, as despite havingunderstood the terrible nature of the bloodshed from the start and making considerable efforts toextract themselves from the perilous trajectory of the nation, they remained entangled within thesystems created by the conflict long after it ended. The testimony provided by COs in laterdecades suggests that, for the period between the First World War and the Second World Warmany COs faced lesser consequences for their actions than the conventional narratives purport.Furthermore, while the latter conflict was certainly a notable event in their personal histories, tothe same extent that it impacted all British citizens, Britain9s WW1 COs were less involved inWW2 than one might expect.232 Eric Armson Beavon, handwritten diary, <November 1918 to March 1919,= LIDDLE/WW1/CO/007, <Beavon,Eric Armson,= Peter Liddle Collection.90In the First World War9s aftermath, the most obvious and immediate consequence of theconflict on COs was their continued imprisonment. A large percentage of those COs who hadgone to prison rather than accept alternative service remained behind bars for months after theguns had fallen silent. Norman Gaudie, for example, remained imprisoned at Maidstone untilApril 1919, a full five months after the armistice between Great Britain and Germany came intoeffect.233 Jack Foister found himself in identical circumstances to Gaudie.234 In fact, April 1919seems to mark the return to freedom for the majority of imprisoned COs. Absolutist Henry Smithdescribed his release in March 1919, permitted on medical grounds related to an eye issue, asbeing <a little before the general release.=235 Smith9s reference to <the general release= issomewhat ambiguous. He may have been suggesting that most COs were released from prison atthat time, or, on a more general note, referring to the fact that most British soldiers weredemobilized in Spring 1919. In either scenario, whether Smith9s early release constituted aninstance of good luck or bad luck is debatable, given it came as a result of poor physical health,but fellow CO James Landers was certainly unlucky. Landers had to wait even longer thanFoister and Gaudie for his freedom, as he remained behind bars at Wormwood Scrubs until June18th, 1919.236How did COs feel about this extended detainment? For some, like Phillip Radley, it wasan unexpected and disappointing development. He admitted in a 1974 interview that he hadexpected he would be released when the war was over and thus, when Armistice Day came andhe remained imprisoned, it <was in a way, probably, as difficult a time as I knew.=237 And while237 Phillip Radley, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #642, REEL #7.236 James Landers, untitled notes, 1979, 10, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/053, <Landers, James,= Peter Liddle Collection.235 Henry Smith, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, October 1978,LIDDLE/WW1/CO/087, <Smith, Henry,= Tape #610(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.234 Jack Foister, interview by Liddle, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/031, <Foister, Jack, =Tape #388 (transcript), Peter LiddleCollection.233 Norman Gaudie, untitled notes, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/038, <Gaudie, Norman,= Peter Liddle Collection.91Radley was not personally among their number, this caused some COs to go to great lengths tomake their disdain for the situation very clear to their captors, as documented in Ann Kramer9sConscientious Objectors of the First World War. Kramer focuses on acts of disobedience andrebellion undertaken by COs, and as she notes, in response to their prolonged jail time, <AtWandsworth socialist and anarchist COs, infuriated by the delay in release, and led byflamboyant anarchist Guy Aldred, stepped up their protests and a full-scale riot broke out. Othermuch smaller demonstrations occurred in Leicester, Leeds, Pentonville, Liverpool, Newcastleand Preston prisons.=238In contrast to these passionate firebrands, other COs seem to have had no particularlystrong grudge against the government for keeping them imprisoned beyond the war9s end.Although one might expect that most COs would express dissatisfaction with the length of theperiod between the supposed end of the First World War and their eventual release fromincarceration, there is a fair amount of commentary given by COs that displayed a startlinglycasual attitude regarding the circumstances. In his recollection, Landers offers only the succinctobservation that <The War came to an end, but I was kept in prison until protest resulted in myrelease on 18th June, 1919, and others.=239 Foister, Gaudie and Smith were similarly brief whendiscussing this period in their own notes and interviews.240 Frank Merrick retroactively describedhis hope that he would be released by Christmas as <naive,= and astutely offered his own theoryas to why COs experienced this delay, suggesting that <the reason was a lot of the soldiers whoweren9t dearmed would have been very angry if conscientious objectors had been released whenthey were still kept soldiering.=241 Although he does not mention it directly, Merrick9s remarks241 Frank Merrick, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #381, REEL #3.240 Foister, interview by Liddle, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/031, Tape #388 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection; Gaudie,untitled notes, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/038, <Gaudie, Norman,= Peter Liddle Collection.; Smith, interview by Liddle,LIDDLE/WW1/CO/087, <Smith, Henry,= Tape #610 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.239 Ibid.238 Ann Kramer, Conscientious Objectors of the First World War, 150.92serve as a reminder of a fact that Landers either forgot or never fully understood. Contrary toLander9s assertion that <The War came to an end= in November 1918, the Armistice Day treatydid not actually mark the end of the First World War, merely a ceasefire. Peace would not beformally achieved until the Treaty of Versaille was signed on June 28th of the following year.Taking this fact into account, Landers9 release on June 18th still technically came before the warended.The collection of letters written by Eric Pritchard Southall from Walton Gaol in Liverpoolto his mother provide a glimpse into the mind of a non-protesting CO during this time of extremeuncertainty, and they suggest that the stoicism on display in retrospective accounts from COsmay not reflect their feelings at the time with full accuracy. The first relevant extract was pennedon November 7th, 1918. In an impressive display of predictive prowess, Southall accuratelyanticipated the delay in his release from prison. He wrote that <If the war should crumple up (as Isuppose is on the cards) I feel that we absolutists will be starting on the most trying part of ourimprisonment. There will always be the plausible hope of speedy release; but with our presentadministration I do not feel too hopeful on the subject.=242 Southall9s pragmatic attitude here,while vindicated by the manner in which events played out, is reflective of the general tone thatcolours his commentary on his prolonged imprisonment throughout the following months,although he clearly became more upset with the situation as it dragged on. For example, onNovember 21st, 1918, Southall wrote that he could <fix no dates 3 neither earliest nor latest 3 formy discharge; in no event do I mean to worry overmuch 3 not if I can help it 3 and as yet I amcertainly serene and very well in health.=243 Southall was able to remain resilient throughout243 Ibid., November 21st 1918.242 Eric Pritchard Southall to his mother, November 7th, 1918, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/090, <Southall, Eric Pritchard,=Peter Liddle Collection.93November and December, describing himself as <amused and cheerful, not wetting my midnightpillow with salt tears or cooling my porridge with sighs.=244But by the new year, Southall began to adopt something of a more dour tone regardinghis circumstances. On January 30th, 1919, he admitted <I wish it was release and not snow Iexpected!=245 In February Southall claimed he had rallied and regained his good spirits, albeitwhile confessing that <Relapses are always possible and I shall kick if I miss another May.=246Thankfully, Southall would not have to resort to kicking, as he was finally granted his freedomon April 9th, 1919, which apparently came just <in time to avert a nervous breakdown=according to comments included at the foot of the page in the typed extracts from his letters.247There is evidence to suggest that this remark presumably came from Southall himself, circa1983.248After they were finally released from prison, COs still faced numerous difficultiesstemming from their decision to object to the war, although those difficulties varied in terms oftheir actual impact on COs9 lives. Many scholars have written about the social stigmatization andlegal ramifications that COs faced in post-war British society. Kramer, for instance, is one of thenumerous academics who have turned their attention towards the civil disenfranchisement ofCOs that occurred as part of the 1917 Representation of the People Bill, which stripped all COsbesides members of the Non-Combat Corps of the right to vote in British elections for five yearsafter the war, or August 1926.249 Of course, Kramer also feels that this amounted to <the least of249 Ann Kramer, Conscientious Objectors of the First World War, 153-154.248 See Eric Pritchard Southall, <The Wakefield Experiment September 1918: Memorandum by Eric P. Southall,= 1,LIDDLE/WW1/CO/090, <Southall, Eric Pritchard,= Peter Liddle Collection.247 LIDDLE/WW1/CO/090, <Southall, Eric Pritchard,= Peter Liddle Collection.246 Ibid., February 13th, 1919.245 Ibid., January 30th, 1919.244 Ibid., December 18th 1918.94their worries. Poor health, financial hardship and difficulties in finding a job were far morepressing concerns.=250Kramer is correct in her assessment that this was a minor concern for COs, but this wasnot merely for the reasons that she listed. Rather, it seems that this particular piece of legislationwas rarely enforced. As part of his interviews with COs, Dr. Peter Liddle frequently asked themabout how they were personally impacted by the Representation of the People Bill. Theirresponses were unexpected. Alfred William Evans reported that he had been aware of the law,but that it had not prevented him from exercising his right to vote.251 William Sloan Cormackasserted that <that vote business, no vote for five years was all nonsense, I voted at the firstelection after the war.=252 Other COs did not even know what Liddle was talking about when hefirst brought it up, such as H. England.253 Two of the few COs who reported that they wereactively disqualified from voting were brothers Leonard and Roland Payne. But ironically,according to these two, they had not even attempted to vote. The Payne brothers told Liddle thatWe were disqualified for so many years but they hadn9t noticed we were disqualified butwe didn9t approve of the man who was putting up for Parliament at the time. He was aman who had been rather bitter at conscientious objectors and we didn9t vote. Well, theynoticed that we hadn9t voted. Then they realized that we should have been disqualifiedand I think the conservative brought the question up. The conservative office inLeicestershire put in a claim against us and we were disqualified for 5 years.254This, then, was apparently an act of law so comically ineffective that it actually impacted thosewho were too apathetic to bother breaking it to a greater degree than it impacted those who254 Len and Roland Payne, interview by Liddle, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/070, <Payne, Leonard Joseph,= Tape #44(transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.253 H. England, interview by Liddle, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/029, <England, Ernest,= Tape #282 (transcript), PeterLiddle Collection.252 Dr. William Cormack, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, August, 1972, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/022, <WilliamCormack,= Tape #60 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.251 Alfred William Evans, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, May, 1973, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/030, <Evans, AlfredWilliam= Tape #82 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.250 Ibid., 154.95actively sought to subvert it. While the passing of this law is certainly indicative of officialgovernment attitudes towards COs, it also suggests that these attitudes could be performative innature, rather than necessarily stemming from passionately held beliefs.The attitude of potential employers towards COs, however, was far less performative.The stigma against COs that had been cultivated throughout the conflict among British civiliansposed a heavy obstacle for the newly-freed pacifists as they began to search for work. As COMark Henry Chambers Hayler put it in his 1974 interview with the IWMyour chances of getting a job was very remote indeed when you came out. That was partof the price you paid. I got many a job, and then the last move ruled me out entirely. Theywould say 8Oh, what did you do in the Great War?9 Well, that was the end of it. Don9tneed to go any further than that. There were no more questions ever asked, you see.255Furthermore, the difficulty that COs faced in finding employment was intensified by thegeneral lack of jobs available in the post-war British economy, a fact that CO Walter Griffinstressed in his interview with Dr. Peter Liddle when asked about his post-war job search. Griffinclaimed that <One must not forget that there were notices up outside factories where they mayhave a vacancy, only ex servicemen need apply… but even ex servicemen very often couldn9t getemployment in any case. So we conscientious objectors obviously wouldn9t get very muchopportunity at all for employment.=256 Griffin9s anecdotal observations about the state of theBritish economy at this time are supported by administrative data compiled by the CentralStatistical Office later in the 1990s, which shows that the unemployment rate in the UnitedKingdom between November 1919 and January 1920 fluctuated between 5.4-6.1%, and while itaveraged out to 3.9% overall in 1920, the average rose to 16.9% in 1921.257 This drastic increase257 James Denman & Paul McDonald, <Unemployment Statistics from 1881 to the Present Day,= Labour MarketTrends, January 1996, 6.256 Walter George Griffin, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, November 1978, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/041, <Griffin, WalterGeorge,= Tape #552 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.255 Mark Henry Chambers Hayler, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, 1974, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #357, REEL #27, Imperial War Museum, London, England.96was the result of the National Insurance Act of 1920, which came into effect in November andbrought the employment situation of <the majority of manual workers, together with a largeproportion of non-manual workers= to the attention of the government, suggesting that this highrate of unemployment had probably been overlooked, rather than absent, in the data collectedbetween November 1919 and November 1920.258Still, despite the overall high unemployment rate and the fact that they were heavilydisadvantaged in their competition with returning soldiers over what scant jobs were available,some COs reported experiencing only a minor struggle in their search for steady work. FredMurfin was able to leverage a reference from his pre-war employer in the printing industry intoanother position within the same field, and while that job itself was short-lived, he only foundhimself unemployed for six weeks during <the time of the slump= before another opportunitycame his way.259 While Murfin9s experience represents something of an outlier among COs whospent time in prison, testimony from members of the FAU suggests that they faced littledifficulty in securing work. Ernest E. Dodd, who spent the war working on ambulance ships andtrains, recalled that while he did not return to his pre-war post, he <got another job without muchdifficulty.=260 Edward Addison, who spent time as both a member of the FAU and the WarVictims Relief Committee, asserted that he did not face any problems finding work as a result ofhis wartime experiences <because I was in agriculture.=261 The relative simplicity of findingemployment for FAU members in comparison to those who spent the whole war in prison or whotook up work on the Home Office Scheme suggests that they did not suffer the same degree ofostracization by the British public after the war.261 Edward Addison, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, March 1978, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/FAU/001, <Addison, E.,= Tape#517, (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.260 Ernest E. Dodd, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, June 1978, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/025, <Dodd, Ernest E.,= Tape#516 (transcript), Peter Liddle Collection.259 Fred Murfin, Prisoners for Peace, 16, TEMP MSS 722, Prisoners for Peace.258 Ibid, 8.97Although many COs sought a return to normalcy and attempted to assimilate themselvesinto the general populace when the war ended, there were also those who believed that theircrusade for peace was not yet finished. Rather than returning to their pre-war lives, theseindividuals continued, in one form or another, their campaign against the violence which hadclaimed so many lives over the length of the conflict. Many of these men were Quakers who leftEngland in order to pursue a more peaceful world in alignment with their beliefs. JohnBrocklesby, for instance, became a missionary in Africa, working under the banner of theFriends Foreign Missionary Association.262 George Frederick Dutch stayed in Poland after thewar ended, engaged in relief work.263 Particularly impressive were the exploits of CorderCatchpool, who spent time in Germany from 1919-1921 helping to feed children, then returnedto Germany in 1931 and <worked for reconciliation among Germany, England and France; hesought to reduce the severity of the Versailles Treaty= before later assisting those persecuted bythe Nazis in fleeing the country.264 Still, even among COs, these men were unique in the depth oftheir commitment to creating the conditions necessary for a sustained peace. As Mark Haylercomplained to Dr. Peter Liddle in 1976, <I found that when the war was over or when the menwere dispersed that they sank back. Far too many of them. They didn9t maintain the peacemovement and today it is a job to even maintain the peace movement.=265Although a failure to 8maintain the peace movement9 hardly places responsibility for theoutbreak of the Second World War upon the shoulders of Britain9s WW1 COs, the beginning ofanother global conflict admittedly called the significance of their ideological stand into question.After all, their staunch devotion to the anti-war movement had not kept the nations of Europe265 Hayler, interview by Liddle, LIDDLE/WW1/CO/044, <Hayler, Mark H C,= Tape #348 (transcript), Peter LiddleCollection.264 Corder Catchpool, On Two Fronts: Letters of a Conscientious Objector, (New York: Garland Publishing Inc.,1972), 10-11.263 George Dutch, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #356, REEL #7, #8 & #9.262 Brocklesby, Escape from Paganism, 70, TEMP MSS 412, John Brocklesby Papers.98from taking up arms against one another yet again. The message they had hoped to send hadgone unheeded. Two decades after they first refused the order to fight for their country, andfinding their homeland plunged into another war, how did these men view the prospect ofanother great war?Some former COs took a slightly different stance in WW2 than they had in WW1. Whenasked about the Second World War during his 1989 interview with the IWM,politically-motivated CO and Independent Labour Party member William Hodge described it as<different altogether than the one before, I think= and admitted that <something had to be doneabout Hitler, no doubt about that.=266 And yet, when the interviewer asked Hodge whether hewould have joined the army if he had been young enough to fight in the Second World War,Hodge struggled to articulate a clear response, replying:Well I was beyond joining an army by that time but, uh, no… I thought Hitler3realizing that Hitler represented the worst in the world. And in that sense to say 3I didn9t. I mean, hope for victory against him sort of style, but my God, and thatmeans knowing that human beings are 3 no context, no reason one way or theother sort of style…267Another CO, Lewis Maclachlan, claimed that his attitude towards pacifism in the Second WorldWar was different than in the First World War <because I had grown up. I was taking a moreresponsible attitude.= He later elaborated on that point by remarking that <in the Second WorldWar I was thinking more in terms of the church and the community and what we ought to do, andperhaps my fierce pacifism of the First World War may have been tempered a little, I don9tknow.=268268 Lewis Maclachlan, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, July 30th, 1974, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #565, REEL #5, Imperial War Museum, London, England.267 Ibid,.266 William Hodge, interview by Lyn E. Smith, recording, October 30th 1989, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #11033, REEL #2, Imperial War Museum, London, England.99There are a few factors to take into account when considering the ways that Hodge andMaclachlan described their relationships with the Second World War. The first, which wasacknowledged in Hodge9s response to his interviewer, is that the vast majority of WW1 COs didnot truly face the possibility of conscription in the Second World War. As previously mentioned,the minimum age for conscription in WW1 in Britain was 18 years of age. Thus, even if a COhad been 18 years old in 1919 when the war ended, they would have been 38 in 1939 when theSecond World War broke out. While the National Service Act of 1939 did render all British menaged 18 to 41 at that time eligible to be called up for service, this initially meant only men bornin a specific three-year window would have been eligible for conscription in both the First andSecond World Wars. Admittedly, the age range of men eligible for conscription was laterincreased to men aged 17-51, theoretically increasing the pool of former WW1 COs eligible forconscription in WW2.In practice, however, men were called up in age groups, as shown in an article publishedin The Guardian on January 2nd 1940, that warned men from the ages of 19-27 that they werelikely to be called up that year.269 According to military historian George Forty, only a smallnumber of men above the age of 41 were ever conscripted, and 45 was the upper limit, althoughunfortunately Forty did not provide a source to show how he arrived at this conclusion and itmust therefore be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.270 Still, Hodge and his interviewercertainly treated the notion that Hodge was too old to have faced conscription in the SecondWorld War as a foregone conclusion, as did another CO, Percy Leonard, in a similar interview,271271 Leonard, interview with Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #382, REEL #5.270 George Forty, British Army Handbook, 1939-1945 (Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton,1998), 6.269 “Another 2,000,000 men to register= Guardian, January 2nd, 1940,https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,128184,00.html, retrieved February 29th 2024.100suggesting that few, if any, WW1 COs were faced with the prospect of being conscripted asecond time.The second key factor to consider is the social climate surrounding the two world wars inGreat Britain at the time Hodge and Maclachlan gave their interviews. By the time Maclachlanspoke to the IWM in 1974, <Oh! What A Lovely War= had been entertaining British audiencesfor more than a decade. Hodge9s interview was conducted on October 30th, 1989, just asBlackadder Goes Forth was hitting British televisions for the first time and a mere three daysbefore the infamous final episode would send its unlucky protagonists over the top to theirnear-certain demise. Both men were probably highly aware of the transformation of the FirstWorld War within the British cultural consciousness that had transpired over the interveningdecades, a cultural shift that largely vindicated the stand they had taken against the war. In fact, itis possible that this shift in attitude was one of the reasons so many COs happily suppliedinterviews to the IWM and Dr. Liddle in the 1970s & 80s, since their distaste for the First WorldWar no longer marked them as black sheep among their fellow Britons. They may have felt asthough their countrymen were finally prepared to listen to what they had been saying all along.Public opinion on the Second World War, however, was an entirely different matter.Indeed, as Adrian Gregory observes in the conclusion to The Last Great War: British Society andthe First World War, the general feeling of senselessness that characterizes the modern Britishperception of the First World War is partially, arguably even primarily, driven by the sense of<obvious moral superiority= attributed to the Second World War due to recognition of the sheerreprehensibility of the Nazi regime.272 Although Gregory made that observation in 2008, thisviewpoint was equally prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps it was this attitude that272 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008), 294-295.101informed Dr. Peter Liddle9s choice of words when he asked CO William Sloan Cormack <Youthink that conscientious objection to service against Hitler9s Nazi Germany was stilldefenceable?= during their 1972 interview.273Indeed, if taken at face value, Hodge9s reference to his own perspective during theSecond World War demonstrates that this belief that Nazi Germany was an uniquely evil foe wasalready developing during the conflict itself. But whether or not it can be taken at face value is atricky question. After all, at the onset of the war, the average Briton had no idea of the crimesagainst humanity that were to be committed over the next few years as part of the Holocaust.How could they? And why, then, would they believe Hitler, and the Germany he represented, tobe a uniquely intense form of evil? Daniel Todman has argued that Neville Chamberlain9s policyof appeasement, regardless of any other failings, successfully cultivated an atmosphere wherein<by summer 1939, any failure of compromise had to be laid at the German dictator9s door…Hitler9s evident determination to have a war aroused a deep anger that came from the same placeas popular royalism.=274 British anger at Hitler during the lead-up to the war stemmed fromnational pride, but this was not a new or unfamiliar sentiment. In fact, Todman asserts that Hitlerwas <a rather more traditional sort of enemy: the villainous, jumped-up foreign aristocrat whowas breaking promises, acting unfairly, laughing at Britain and trying to take over the world.=275Perhaps Hitler9s clear enthusiasm for warfare was enough to alter Hodge9s sensibilities andconvince him that Hitler made Germany a more dangerous and reprehensible foe than it had beentwo decades prior and thereby justified the war. But it seems more likely that retrospective275 Ibid,.274 Daniel Todman, Britain's War: into Battle, 1937-1941, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2016),187.273 William Cormack Sloan, interview by Dr. Peter Liddle, August 1972, Liddle/WW1/CO/022, <Cormack, WilliamSloan,= Tape #60 (transcript), Dr. Peter Liddle Collection.102knowledge of the Holocaust, and the unfathomable loss of life that it entailed, anachronisticallyintensified Hodge9s recollection of his feelings at the time.Viewed in light of these facts, the inability of Hodge and Maclachlan to condemn theSecond World War in their retrospective interviews with the same wholehearted conviction thatthey and other COs rejected the First World War is hardly surprising. It was merely honest. Theyhad a greater degree of distance from the war, and were not faced with the same life-definingproblem of whether to serve their country or to follow their own principles at great expense totheir own well-being. Their fellow CO Walter Manthorpe addressed precisely this reality whenspeaking to the IWM, noting that <the Second World War didn9t affect me in the same way,because I wasn9t of a military age and the same consequences didn9t come up.=276 Furthermore,the eventual widespread recognition of the Nazi crimes against humanity meant it was muchharder for these men to argue, in their old age, that no war was worth fighting.Some WW1 COs found that the Second World War had an even greater impact on theirpacifistic tendencies than Hodge and Maclachlan, to the extent that they abandoned theiranti-war stance altogether in the face of the latter conflict. In the First World War, HaroldHolttum was a member of the FAU who spent the war assisting Belgian refugees in Birmingham.Yet in the Second World War he joined the Warwickshire Home Guard in Coventry. Holttumclaimed to have made this decision after hearing radio broadcasts of Hitler giving speeches,which led him to conclude that the German dictator was <obviously mad and he9s got to bestopped. And that was that, as far as we were concerned.=277 Still, Holttum9s paradigm shift wasnever entirely completed. Ultimately, when he reflected on the two wars in 1988, he admitted to277 Harold Holttum, interview by Lyn. E. Smith, recording, October 23rd, 1988, Imperial War Museum SoundArchive, Catalogue #10459, REEL #2, Imperial War Museum, London, England.276 Walter Frederic Manthorpe, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, February 18th, 1974,Imperial WarMuseum Sound Archive, Catalogue #659, REEL #6, Imperial War Museum, London, England.103his interviewer that he still did not <know which [stance] was right. I did what I thought wasright at the time. That9s all I know.=278The transformation of Archibald Fenner Brockway9s ideals was arguably even moresignificant than Holttum9s change of opinion. Although Brockway had been a key figure in theanti-war movement during the First World War, serving as a member of the ILP and playing akey role in the formation of the NCF, he would later break away from his personal philosophy ofpacifism in the aftermath of the conflict. Brockway9s departure from pacifism came early,prompted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War rather than the Second World War, andfollowed his realization that he <wanted them [the Spanish anarchists] to win. And I thought Icouldn9t want them to win without doing something to help them win. That meant I could nolonger be a complete pacifist.=279 Holttum, Hodge and Maclachlan9s varying degrees ofmovement away from pacifism was the result of being confronted with the Nazi regime9s war inEurope, which seemed to represent such an active threat to European lives that it may havejustified a defensive war. But Brockway9s decision to abandon pacifism was instead rooted in achange of perception that recontextualized war as a valid method to achieving a specificideological outcome. Abandoning the ideology of pacifism did not necessarily mean thatBrockway abandoned the anti-war movement entirely. As he noted, <though I was tremendouslyanti-Hitler and couldn9t oppose the Second World War as I did the First, I remained Chairman ofthe Central Board of Conscientious Objectors, because I believe in the validity of conscience somuch.=280280 Ibid., REEL #4.279 Archibald Fenner Brockway, interview by Margaret A. Brooks, recording, March 27th, 1974, Imperial WarMuseum Sound Archive, Catalogue #476, REEL #2, Imperial War Museum, London, England.278 Ibid., REEL #4.104Brockway was far from the only WW1 CO to leverage their experiences in the priorconflict to assist, even to shape, the Second World War9s CO movement. Percy Leonard, forinstance, made appearances at tribunals for WW2 COs, and proudly reported in an interview that<in every case where I appeared for them, I got them off.=281 Mark Henry Chambers Hayler tookup similar work. During the Second World War, Hayler was the chairman of the Croydon branchof the Peace Pledge Union assisting WW2 COs with preparing them for their tribunals.According to Hayler, not only did he assist these men with the paperwork element of theirapplications, but he also regularly attended the tribunals themselves, although he only recalledappearing as a character witness on one occasion.282 Hayler also, unlike many of his WW1 COpeers, was briefly faced with at least a small degree of consequences for his continued pacifismduring the Second World War. Hayler refused to participate in fire-watching and was fined £5,which he refused to pay, although a sympathetic official chose to pay the fine himself rather thanlevy higher penalties against Hayler.283In addition to providing specific, material assistance to the next generation of COs oncethe war broke out, Britain9s WW1 COs had served as an inspiration for their younger peers. Anumber of WW2 COs were the children or other younger relatives of those who had objectedtwo decades before. Kenneth Fletcher Wray, for instance, was an objector in the Second WorldWar who had had two elder brothers who were WW1 COs. Wray felt that their decisions <setsome pattern to my life, too.=284 And even though Holttum abandoned his pacifist beliefs in theSecond World War, his son, John, took after Holttum9s earlier stance when he came ofconscription age in 1945 and became a CO, although Holttum could not wholly recall whether284 Wray, Kenneth Fletcher. interview by Lyn E. Smith, recording, September 9th, 1980, Imperial War MuseumSound Archive, Catalogue #4696, REEL #1, Imperial War Museum, London, England.283 Ibid., REEL #13.282 Hayler, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #356, REEL #21.281 Leonard, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #382, REEL #5.105John actually faced a tribunal before the war in Europe came to a close.285 Socialist CO JackSadler raised his daughter Dorothy to share his pacifist beliefs. When British women wereeventually conscripted for war work in 1941 she, as a member of the Newcastle War Resistersrefused to register.286 Albert Laverack, a CO who eventually regretted his decision to participatein the Home Office Scheme in the First World War, decided to harden his resolve and take thestaunch absolutist position in the Second World War alongside his family. As Laverack later toldPauline Pollard in his correspondence with her some decades later, the family <had a bad time.Our daughter was court tried and our son was sent to prison but we did not give in.=287Ultimately, there can be no argument that the First World War did not have lastingconsequences on many of the COs who took up a stand against it 3 but the severity of thoseconsequences is debatable. Many of those who were imprisoned suffered an additional delay ofnearly half a year in resuming their lives. Such a span of time probably felt considerable to menof a relatively young demographic who had already spent years imprisoned. But the loss of anadditional five or six months probably did not drastically alter the course of their lives. Beingofficially barred from voting may have kept some COs from full participation in the democraticsystem, but testimony suggests that many COs were totally unimpacted by this policy. COs mayhave had difficulty finding work once the war wrapped up, but so too did plenty of British menwho found themselves hunting for jobs in a depressed economy. Perhaps it was this lack of anyunique long-term consequences that allowed so many COs to develop an apparent sense ofdistance from their rebellion during the two-decade gap between the wars. Whatever the reasonsmay be, by the time that the Second World War came about, Britain9s WW1 COs were no longer287 Albert Laverack to Pauline Pollard, February 9th 1971, TEMP MSS 454, Pauline Pollard Correspondence.286 “Sadler Story (1985),= Amber Current Affairs Unit, Amber Film & Photography Collective, 1985, video, 22:00,https://www.amber-online.com/collection/sadler-story-1985.285 Holttum, interview by Smith, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #10459, REEL #4.106the engine driving the anti-war movement. Some played a part, certainly, as minor participants indissident actions or as advocates, supporters and inspirations for the next generation of anti-warvisionaries, but they did not rally under the banner of conscientious objection with anythingapproaching the same degree of zeal as they had when Britain had tried to requisition theirbodies to serve as cogs in its great war machine back in 1916.107Conclusions: CO Assessments of British Society Post-1945 & BeyondInformation on the lives and activities of Britain9s WW1 COs in the immediate aftermathof the Second World War is, unfortunately, not in abundance. With the exception of those fewwho were public figures such as Lord Fenner Brockway or diplomat and olympian PhilipNoel-Baker, most COs were <ordinary= men who led relatively ordinary lives after the war andconsequently did not create much of a visible footprint in the historical record. In particular, theperiod from 1945 to the 1970s is a blind spot regarding Britain9s WW1 COs, since it predates themajor efforts to record their story for posterity made by historical record-keepers throughprojects such as the interviews conducted by the IWM and Dr. Liddle. Exacerbating this problemis the unfortunate case of the Pearce Register of WW1 Conscientious Objectors, which is a tragicdemonstration of the inherent riskiness that historians face when relying on digital databases ofevidence. This ambitious project was the work of Dr. Cyril Pearce, who described the project asa <database of CO histories= compiled from <scattered, incomplete and fragmentary= evidencethat nevertheless told the stories of more than 17,000 COs.288 The Pearce Register was madeavailable to the public on May 15, 2015, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums as partof their <Lives of the First World War= website. Naturally, this database represented the mostcomprehensive and useful resource imaginable for any historian concerned with Britain9s WW1COs, although how thoroughly this project explored their lives after the war itself is unclear.Unfortunately, after less than a decade at the time of writing, the Pearce Register hasseemingly disappeared from the internet 3 while a scattered number of COs still have entries onthe aforementioned IWM website, they are not collected and collated as part of any central,searchable database. These remaining entries are also flawed and incomplete, despite how288 Pearce, Cyril, <Uncovering the history of Britain9s war resisters,=https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/blogs/uncovering-history-britains-war-resisters, last modified October 11, 2021.108promising they appear at first glance. For example, the entry for FAU member John WilfredHarvey has a fairly extensive timeline that tracks his life from his birth to his death, including hisemployment and education before and after the war. According to this timeline, Harvey foundemployment at the University of Leeds from 1932-1954 and eventually passed away in 1967.289However, attempting to click on the hyperlinks that promise sources for that informationproduces only a blank pop-up. Thus, the few entries from the Pearce Register that do remainavailable on this site provide, at best, leads on the lives of COs that must be confirmed throughother independent sources. (In the case of Harvey, the IWM timeline is corroborated by theinventory description for documents belonging to his family that were eventually donated to theUniversity of Leeds.)290Harvey9s death in 1967 also shows another complicating factor that renders research intothe post-WW2 lives of WW1 COs difficult, which is the fact that the population of WW1 COsnaturally began to dwindle as their age started to catch up with them. Among those who had beensent to France, for example, Norman Gaudie passed away in either 1954 or 1955 as a result of hisasthma291 and a search of British probate records suggests that Robert Armstrong Lown alsopassed away in 1954. Because so much of the surviving retrospective testimony from WW1 COsoriginates from the interviews conducted by the IWM and Dr. Liddle in the 1970s, thesetestimonies really only capture the experiences and perspectives of those COs who were stillliving a decade-and-a-half after the Second World War, and therefore had a clear understanding291 Durham County Council, <Norman Gaudie (1887-1955),= Durham at War Project, accessed April 3rd, 2024,https://www.durhamatwar.org.uk/story/11294; Peace Pledge Union, <NORMAN GAUDIE 1887-1954,= The MenWho Said No: Conscientious Objectors 1916-1919, accessed April 3rd, 2024,https://www.menwhosaidno.org/Sentenced/gaudie_norman.html.290 <Papers relating to the Harvey Family of Leeds,= University of Leeds Special Collections,https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/7818, accessed April 10th, 2024.289 Imperial War Museums, <John Wilfred Harvey,= Lives of the First World War,https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/1587671, accessed April 10th, 2024.109of that conflict9s social and political consequences. This may have meant that hindsight colouredtheir perspectives to an even greater extent than it would have influenced the perspectives ofCOs who passed away at an earlier date.This dissertation has already briefly discussed how British society9s evolving attitudestowards the First and Second World Wars in the early days of the latter half of the 20th centurymay have impacted the fashion in which British WW1 COs viewed and verbalized theirexperiences in their retrospective accounts. But these shifting social paradigms are not merelytools for recontextualizing the past 3 they can simultaneously serve as blueprints for building adifferent kind of future. While the bulk of this work has focused on the ways that COs viewedthe dramatic experiences of their youth when asked to recollect them in the 1970s and 1980s, itseems prudent to take a brief look at what they expected for the future, and what factors fosteredthose expectations.Fortunately, this is a question that those who laboured to capture the CO9s stories thought,on at least a few occasions, to ask. As was usual for this group of philosophically-diversedissidents, COs varied wildly in their opinions about the future of armed conflict andpeacemaking. Harold Holttum, for example, when asked by Lyn. E. Smith in 1988 how heviewed <the situation today, you know with war and peace, do you feel optimistic or pessimisticwhen you look at the world?= Holttum responded that he believed the only thing preventinganother world war from breaking out was the existence of the atomic bomb. In an impressivedisplay of long-term geopolitical analysis, he specifically predicted that <so far as minor wars areconcerned, such as for instance are going on between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine, I don9tthink that the atom bomb, unless and until someone makes one out there, which God forbid, Idon9t think that it9ll make any difference.=292 Other COs, unlike Holttum, were optimistic about292 Holttum, interview by Smith, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #10459, REEL #4.110the long-term prospects of pacifism. When Margaret A. Brooks asked Charles Hope Gill what hethought <of the hope for pacifism in the years to come?= in his 1974 IWM interview, Gillresponded in a vaguely idealistic fashion, stating <Well, I still implicitly believe in it, butultimately it will be accepted. I9m not saying when or how or anything like that, one simplycan9t.=293 When faced with a similar question, <Do you have hope for the future?= in his IWMinterview that same year, Alfred William Evans responded in a characteristically energeticfashion by offering his views on how human society might ultimately overcome its negativetendencies:Yes. I think now we9re passing through a very bad phase. I think most of our evils havecome from the death of principle. All the various scandals with which [society] is nowafflicted come from the fact that in our society, the profit-motive has become thedominant thing, how much we can get. But that9s not the way of responsibility, and to saythat if they set to work to appreciate the situation, they must get back to that condition ofthings. Jesuits have got it lined up marvelously. <What did it profit the man if he gainedthe whole world and suffered the loss of his own soul?= He9s dead right. And we want toget away from the sentimental Jesus. Hard-task Master Jesus Christ.294The three unique answers these three men gave to what was more or less the samequestion regarding the potential for a lasting peace are, of course, consistent with their individualpersonalities. It is hardly surprising that Holttum, previously noted as having been willing to jointhe Home Guard in the Second World War due to his extreme distaste for Hitler, viewed war asan inevitability. Equally unsurprising is the ambivalent response of Gill, whose wife had to coaxhim into admitting the depth of his familial ostracization, or the religious firebrand attitudedisplayed by Evans, who ardently condemned Saint Paul. Still, it is worth examining the broadersocial context in which each man had the question posed to him and considering how thatcontext may have influenced their responses.294 Evans, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #489, REEL #8. The section in quotation marks isEvan9s approximation of Mark, Chapter 8, Verse 36.293 Gill and Gill, interview by Brooks, IWM Sound Archive, Catalogue #487, REEL #6.111From the end of the Second World War until the early 1990s, the Cold War cast a shadow,impossible to ignore, across the entire globe. The detonation of atomic bombs in Japan in 1945had demonstrated to the world that warfare and international conflict had to be navigated with apreviously unimaginable level of weaponry (in terms of sheer destructive capabilities) in mind.Thus, while Britain may not have been as deeply enmeshed in the nuclear stand-off with theEastern Bloc as their American allies were, the British public was certainly aware of themonumental stakes of the Cold War. The radical political movements that sprang up in Britain inresponse to Cold War tensions had members from a wide variety of backgrounds, including<artists, civil servants, clergy, musicians, politicians, trade unionists and students.=295 Theseindividuals formed organizations to protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare, such asthe Socialist Campaign for Multilateral Disarmament, which was chaired by former WW1 COPhillip Noel-Baker.296 In late 1962, this group engaged in an advertising campaign meant toadvocate for multilateral disarmament in Nottingham and shortly thereafter attempted to gaugethe effectiveness of their messaging by surveying locals of the area alongside a control groupfrom Bradford. However, the timing of this campaign muddied the relevancy of the surveyresults. As Christopher R. Hill observes in Peace and Power in Cold War Britain: Media,Movements and Democracy C. 1945-68:Whatever the impact of the campaign, it was complicated by the outbreak of the CubanMissile Crisis, which dominated the news. Perhaps it was because of the successfulresolution of this crisis that one of the results of the survey turned out to be the oppositeof what had been expected: the proportion of people who believed that nuclear war wouldoccur during their lifetime dropped by about 10 percent in both samples.297297 Ibid., 185.296 Ibid., 183.295 Christopher R. Hill, Peace and Power in Cold War Britain : Media, Movements and Democracy, C.1945-68,(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 1-2, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474279376112All three men 3 Holttum, Hope Gill, and Evans 3 were recounting their experiences atleast a decade after the American government had successfully managed the Cuban MissileCrisis and avoided the potential outbreak of a nuclear war. This was one of several positiveoccurrences that may have set the stage for Hope Gill and Evan9s belief that humankind was onits way to a long-term peace. Another one of those occurrences may have been the Britishreaction to the Vietnam War, as well as the eventual developments of that conflict. AlthoughBritain was not directly involved in the war in Vietnam, Britain9s citizens were acutely aware ofthe conflict. According to Nick Thomas, by 1968 newspaper articles covering protests inEngland against the war were a common feature and could run for multiple pages.298 Of course, itis important not to overstate the intensity of British interest in the war. As Thomas also observes,British protests against the war were always smaller in scope and less violent than protests inother Western nations, and rapidly lost momentum in the early 1970s compared to the 1960s.299Still, they were reflective of the general British attitude towards the war. According to BenClements, who studied opinion poll datasets from 1960-1969 Britain, <the British public wasconsistent in its rejection of troops being committed to the Vietnam War… it clearly prioritisedefforts to seek peace over privileging support for the US.300 Given that the United Stateseventually withdrew its troops from Vietnam by 1973 and Hope Gill and Evans were interviewedby the IWM in 1974, it seems probable that the two COs were, whether consciously orunconsciously, keeping both the prevalence and overall success of anti-Vietnam War protests inmind as they considered the future of human society and the likelihood of a lasting peace.300 Ben Clements, <British Public Opinion Towards the Vietnam War and UK-US Relations During the 1964-70Labour Governments.= International History Review 43, no. 4, 2021, 755-56,https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2020.1828140.299 Ibid., 349-50.298 Nick Thomas, <Protests Against the Vietnam War in 1960s Britain: The Relationship between Protesters and thePress,= Contemporary British History 22, no. 3, 2008, 338, https://doi.org/10.1080/13619460701256192.113Holttum, however, was interviewed in 1988, with a whole new decade9s worth ofgeopolitical developments potentially influencing his outlook. Holttum himself made referenceto the long-running conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine, but there is onesignificant conflict that involved Britain directly which likely intensified his pessimism: theFalklands War in 1982, fought against Argentina over disputed territory in the South Atlantic.The Falklands War was a relatively brief conflict with a small death toll when compared to eitherof the world wars or the Vietnam War, spanning only 10 weeks and resulting in less than 1000overall casualties. Nevertheless, it had a strong impact on Britain. As historian Helen Parrargues, the Falklands War <altered the mood in the country… the Falklands victory seemed tooverride, at least temporarily, a more traditional, conservative attitude towards the use of militaryforce= among British politicians.301 Thus Holttum, interviewed in 1988, had been shown just sixyears prior that his country had not managed to shake off their militaristic impulses. GreatBritain9s government still viewed violence as an acceptable means of protecting and securing itsinternational interests. Great Britain9s citizens not only tacitly permitted their government toresort to such measures, but actively turned out in droves to demonstrate their approval.Resistance to the war from British citizens was minimal; Parr argues that while there was aprotest in Hyde Park that May, it was <overshadowed by reports of the supportive crowds on thedocks at Portsmouth when the fleet had set sail and returned.=302 Thus, Holttum9s cynical outlookon pacifism9s future and the likelihood of continual warfare among humankind seemsdepressingly realistic in the social climate of 1980s Britain, even before one takes into accountHolttum9s personal experiences.302 Ibid., 271.301 Helen Parr, <Remembering the Falklands War in Britain: From Division to Conviction?= Journal of War andCulture Studies 15, no. 3, 2022, 268, https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2022.2078543.114Born in 1896, Harold Holttum was in his nineties when he spoke to the IWM in 1988.That interview seemingly serves as the final major piece of British WW1 CO testimony everdocumented, at least from a chronological perspective, as no other source stemming from a laterdate was identified during the course of my research. While this does not mean that Holttum9sperspectives hold any greater authority or wisdom than those of his peers, it does mean he had,for better or worse, the <final word= in the collective discourse that embodies the culturalmemory of British COs and the last message that they were able to impart to those who inheritedtheir world.In this context, Holttum9s story becomes a bitter pill to swallow for anyone who looks atthe experiences of Britain9s WW1 COs with the hopes of eventually forging a world without war.After all, over the course of his lifetime, Holttum bore witness to nearly a century of on-againoff-again British warfare, and no amount of resistance from those who wished for peace hadbeen able to prevent it. He and his peers, alternativist and absolutist alike, were imprisoned,mocked and emasculated by the rest of British society when they took their stand all those yearsago, even if the degree of that mistreatment varied and they found occasional bastions of supportor, at least, spaces free from outright contempt. Certainly, there was some degree of vindicationin the fact that Britain eventually came to view the First World War as a senseless waste ofhuman life, but that was merely in the wake of a <better= war fought for a <nobler= cause, not asa result of the CO9s stand in WW1. Even Holttum himself was swayed to this manner ofthinking. And no matter how drastically the world changed throughout the 20th century in termsof technology, culture and social paradigms, war remained a near-constant presence, whileanti-war movements ebbed and flowed with inconsistent size and strength. And as of June 2024,all the protests in the world, no matter how passionate, have not yet been able to stem the115recently intensified flow of blood in Gaza, a place where Holttum accurately foresaw aprotracted conflict nearly forty years ago. War persists as a stubborn, ugly fixture in the house ofhumanity, and it seems that no degree of effort will ever be sufficient to rip it from the walls.So why did Britain9s WW1 COs matter? What meaning can be found in their struggle,their suffering, and their story? If war is inevitable, if human beings will repeatedly choose tocommit horrible violence against one another in the name of whatever reasons we can rationalizeto ourselves, if we choose to stain our hands with blood again and again and again and again,why does it matter if a small handful of men who are already dead refused to participate in thebloodshed?It matters because, to put it simply, we learn from history. And, to rewrite an old cliche,those who write history are victors.And Britain9s COs wrote their own histories.They wrote their history when they refused to be defined in any terms but their own,holding onto their individuality and standing firm in their boundaries. Alternativists andabsolutists, Quakers and Church of England and Roman Catholics and Socialists, these mencould not be compelled to violate the edicts of their own moral codes, nor could they be silenced.They wrote their history when they earned the respect of the spiritual leaders, legal officers andmilitary officials who held power and authority over them, and when they wrote their historywhen they refused to cower before that same authority in the face of violence or even the threatof death. They wrote their history when they held onto their own sense of masculinity, and whenthey refused to let the reaction of their families to their choices change their decision. They wrotetheir history when they followed their hearts a second time, during another war, by acting in116whatever capacity felt right to them under these new circumstances and by helping those whofollowed in their footsteps.Most importantly, they wrote their history when they shared it with others throughout therest of their lives, enshrining their collective memory in the archives and giving their stories alife that would endure beyond their own span of time on Earth. In doing so, they passed on apowerful message. These men, so fiercely protective of their right to self-determination, wereunited in their belief that one has the right to follow their own moral compasses as the ultimateauthority, and that nobody should be able to take that away from someone else. They felt that thedecision of whether or not to take up arms should be left up to the individual, not decided by thestate or the pressures of the general public. Even if war cannot, as a whole, be eliminated, itshould only be waged by those who do of their own volition. Blood should only stain the handsof the willing.Only time can tell whether their message will be heeded. Certainly, for a time, it was, andthe positive outcomes of their efforts were plainly apparent. Although conscription returned toBritain in WW2, the influence of WW19s COs was palpable. Their struggle had resulted in aconscientious objection <process [that] had become both easier and more acceptable.=303Furthermore, in the wake of the Second World War, Britain became the first of the <four majorEuropean powers= from that conflict to end conscription, a decision the country made in 1960.304That does not mean, however, that the matter is permanently settled.In fact, Britain9s youth may need to be particularly vigilant as to the matter ofconscription at present, lest the message of Britain9s WW1 COs fall upon newly-deafened ears.In January 2024, General Patrick Sanders, the chief of staff for the British army, proposed <that304 Ibid., 263.303 Ellsworth-Jones, We Will Not Fight, 254.117the UK should form a 8citizen army9= if conflict broke out between NATO and Russia.305 Andalthough it is not quite the same as outright conscription, in May 2024 Rishi Sunak, seekingre-election as Prime Minister of the UK, announced his plans to enact a policy of <mandatorynational service= if the Conservative Party won the election that year. That policy came in theform of a choice for 18-year-olds <between a full-time placement in the armed forces orvolunteering in their community.=306 But while Sunak ultimately lost that election, and while thechoice between military service and civil service during peacetime is still less dramatic than whatwas asked of British citizens in 1916, the very fact that this was a matter for debate in Britishpolicy highlights the ultimately precarious nature of societal reforms. Hard-fought victories wonby civil dissent must be acknowledged and safeguarded by those who come after the dissenters,or the privileges over which those battles were fought become questions for debate once more asthe recognition of what was sacrificed for them in the first place fades from a society9s collectivememory. 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