The men who wouldn’t go to war
The intriguing story behind this newly unearthed picture of Peter Mandelson’s grandfather with fellow conscientious objectors
TWO years into the First World War, a group of men pose proudly for the camera. But unlike the two and a half million British volunteers who by then had already risked life and limb on the Western Front, these 17 comrades would never bear arms against the enemy.
They wield garden forks instead of rifles and sport tweed jackets instead of khaki uniforms. The only muddy trenches they would experience were those they dug to plant potatoes in a Hertfordshire market garden.
The men were among 16,000 conscientious objectors — ‘Conchies’, as they came to be known — who refused to go to war. And among their number, seated on the left, legs crossed and wearing an elaborate bow tie, is one of the best-known Conchies of them all: Herbert Stanley Morrison.
When this newly discovered photograph was taken, Morrison was 28 years old and, given the opprobrium directed at those who refused to fight, must have worried what the future held for him.
The white feathers sent to men who stayed at home were the least of their humiliations. Some were jailed, some forced to work until they dropped and others sentenced to death for treason.
In this Remembrance week a century after the outbreak of war — and with the ceramic poppies at the Tower of London providing a focus for public support — it is fascinating to remember that even as the fighting raged across the Channel, thousands were prepared to risk their lives to protest against the conflict.
In many ways, Herbert Morrison was lucky — and not just during the war. In the years that followed he would not only climb to the top of the Labour Party but would be appointed by Winston Churchill as Home Secretary during the coalition government of World War II.
While he had opposed the Great War on the basis that it was a conflict between two capitalist empires in which the ordinary man had no say, he had no doubts that the fight against Nazism was a just one.
As well as going on to serve as deputy Prime Minister, he would also inspire another Labour politician — his grandson, Lord Mandelson.
DAN HILL, the historian who came across the photograph and arranged to have it colourised as part of a project to remember the role the county of Hertfordshire played during the Great War, reminds us of t he hardships conscientious objectors faced.
‘Although we are in the throes of remembrance, it is worth mentioning that even the people who didn’t fight had a particularly tough time,’ he said.
‘Nowadays we are probably nearer to the mentality of these individuals than what was the norm 100 years ago. Today Herbert Morrison’s objections to global conflict seem reasonable, although it is important to note that his opposition to the war was very radical. Back then, if you were told to go to war, you went.
‘ These men are part of that cultural shift away from blind obedience. The First World War was a big turning point in our history, yes for women’s roles, but in this way, too. We are pleased to acknowledge the role the conscientious objectors played during the Great War, albeit far from the fighting front.’
That Morrison’s opposition to the war was a principled one, there can be no doubt.
A policeman’s son, he was found to be blind in his right eye shortly after his birth in 1888. That injury alone meant he was officially unfit for service and would have been exempted from conscription.
But rather than use it as a getout, Morrison was determined to make his opposition to the war known publicly from the outbreak of hostilities. He joined the No-Conscription Fellowship, an organisation that required its members to ‘refuse from conscientious motives to bear arms because they consider human life to be sacred’, and even publicly mocked the call to arms.
‘Go forth, little soldier!’ he wrote in the Labour Leader newspaper in September 1914. ‘Though you know not what you fight for — go forth! Though you have no grievance against your German brother — go forth — kill him! Though you may know he has a wife and family dependent on him — go forth and slay him; he is only a German dog. Will he not kill you if he gets the chance? Of course he will. He is told the same story! His King and country need him!’
Voicing such views at a time of heightened patriotism was never likely to win Morrison any friends. Indeed, it regularly put him at risk of physical violence.
Writing i n his autobiography many years later, he vividly recalled one such incident. ‘I remember an open-air meeting on Hampstead Heath one Sunday morning,’ he wrote.
‘I had given the audience my views as to the cause of the war, and expressed my conviction that the involvement of Britain in it had been wrong. My audience was very hostile. I spoke amid a great deal of violent and angry heckling.’
He went on: ‘ Ultimately I was dragged off the platform and dragged by force to a nearby pond. There was some dispute at the edge of the pond, however, when the police intervened, and although my pince-nez glasses were flung into the water, I was not.
‘This was a common experience among the anti- war speakers, although some of them did get a ducking.’
As the war progressed and the casualty lists grew longer, official attitudes towards those who did not volunteer hardened.
This came to a head in 1916 when the Military Services Act was i ntroduced, making all single British men aged 18 to 41 liable to be called up. Soon after, this was extended to include married men.
Those carrying out work ‘ of national importance’ were excluded, as were the medically unfit and ‘approved’ conscientious objectors.
To win such approval required an appearance in front of a tribunal charged with deciding between ‘conscience or cowardice’.
Hearsay and personal opinion were admissible as evidence against them: one outspoken tribunal councillor was heard to declare that ‘a man who would not help to defend his country and womankind is a coward and a cad’.
One approach regularly employed was to test pacifists by asking what they would do if they discovered a German soldier molesting their sister or mother.
The writer Lytton Strachey, who had already outraged ‘decent’ society by parading his effeminacy, replied when asked this: ‘I believe I would try to get between them.’
Men gave many justifications for refusing to fight. The most common was that war and the act of killing were inconsistent with their religion. Others, like Morrison, made a political argument against the war, saying that war had no place in a truly socialist society. Asked by t he Wandsworth Tribunal in South London whether he
belonged to any religious denomination, he replied: ‘I belong to the ILP [the Independent Labour Party, affiliated with Labour at the time] and Socialism is my religion.’
Having refused to fight, Morrison offered to work as a dustman. The request was turned down and he agreed to work on the land. Ironically, according to historian Terry Charman, author of The First World War On The Home Front, this opened him up to criticism on all fronts.
This was because conscientious objectors fell into three categories — ‘absolutists’ opposed to any form of military service and anything that helped the war effort; ‘alternativists’ who were prepared to undertake alternative civilian work free from military control; and ‘non-combatants’ who were prepared to enter the military in a non-combat role.
‘Many people in society gave conscientious objectors a hard time,’ Charman said. ‘Shopkeepers refused to serve them, while others generally treated them with scorn and hostility. They viewed them as cowards.
‘But at the same time some of Herbert Morrison’s f el l ow conscientious objectors thought that by agreeing to the land service he had sold out. They thought he should have gone to prison for his principles.’
That Morrison ended up in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was no coincidence. This newly constructed town had the highest proportion of conscientious objectors in the country.
‘Because it was a new garden city, it was a free-thinking Utopia that brought like-minded people who had been around more radical thoughts together,’ says Hill. ‘It became a hotbed of conscientious objection.’
The town also had a higher-thanaverage casualty rate in the war.
‘We took one of the main roads in the town and plotted the addresses of casualties and conscientious objectors,’ says Hill. ‘We found examples of conscientious objectors living either side of a man who was killed.
‘There are quite a few reports in the local papers of debates in the town between the radical anti-war movement and those whose men were away serving. It must have made life pretty difficult for the objectors.’
Certainly, a minority of Conchies endured terrible experiences.
Walter Roberts, a newly qualified architect and surveyor from Stockport in Cheshire, was the first of 73 conscientious objectors in the UK to lose his life because of his treatment. At the age of 20 he was sent to the notorious Dyce Camp, near Aberdeen, to break rocks in a granite quarry. The 250 inmates, many of them teachers and academics, were unused to backbreaking work.
Soon after his arrival, Walter wrote to his mother: ‘It has only been a question of time for camp conditions here to get the better of me.
‘I don’t want you to worry yourself because the doctor says I have only got a severe chill, but it has reduced me very much. All these fellows here are exceedingly kind and are looking after me ... so there is no reason why I should not be strong in a day or two, when I will write more.’
But two days later, on September 8, 1916, Walter succumbed to influenza and died.
The most brutal case was that of the Richmond Sixteen. Jailed i n the dungeon of Richmond Castle in Yorkshire, in 1916 they were sent against their will to France with the Non-Combatant Corps — an army unit in which men undertook physical labour in support of the military effort without bearing arms. When they refused orders, they were sentenced to death.
Only when one of their number desperately threw a note from a train addressed to his MP was attention drawn to their plight and their death sentences were commuted to ten years prison.
Most objectors, while refusing to fight, willingly helped the war effort. Science teacher Hugo Jackson from Kendal, Cumbria, vehemently opposed the war but joined the Friends Ambulance Unit, which sent more than 1,000 men to the front.
In May 1918, in Picardy, his ambulance was hit by a German shell and he died from his wounds. His bravery was recognised with the French Croix de Guerre as well as the Victory and British War medals.
As for Herbert Morrison, his efforts, while well-intentioned, hardly furthered the British war effort a great deal.
Not being much of a countryman, his early forays into horticulture saw him pull up seedling cabbages and cauliflowers, leaving the weeds in the ground.
A clear sign, if one were needed, that he was better suited to politics than farming.